TRH pt 2: Refusal of the Return
by teddybowties
Summary: Summary from first part THE RETURN carries over. Again, I own nothing I do not own. As far as I am aware, this series of mine is tribute to DoctorWho, Music, Philosophy and Pop Culture, not stealing. Basically, the Doctor has to bail out Gallifrey. Again.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One - Failsafe

The Master never feels the impact as the shard juts through his chest, crushing bone and ripping muscle even as it tears through what the bone and muscle protect. As the light goes out, the ring twists on his finger, capturing the moment and reflecting its energy, preserving him as it was meant to do.

There is a flash, and then, he's the man who isn't there. Because he's everywhere.

He is in his room. He is in the Tomb of Rassilon. He is in the TARDIS. The Panopticon. If he turns the ring the opposite way, he imagines, might he gain substance again? As it is, his body is little more than a projection. He turns the ring, and touches the desk.

"Where… oh yes, I was about to put my mask away."

He takes the mask from his face and stuffs it in a drawer. A rapping noise of four beats can be heard outside the room… he has a visitor. Must have followed him from the… But no one was behind. He's just got back. Whoever could it be? He room is dark. The mask is in his hand. He stuffs it in a drawer.

No, wait. What?

His shoulder… something…

He looks down. There are patches in the drawer. He reaches for one.

Rap.

Rap.

Rap.

Rap.

But things are out of order.

He blinks. Again, time falls back on itself.

He's standing in front of his nightstand. His fingers are on the hem of his long grey glove. He pulls it off, then flops down on the nice warm bed. Pain happens, erupting through his shoulder in a stabbing bloom that leaves his fingers tricky and useless for just long enough. He stares at the ring for a moment, then rips the bear mask from his face and stuffs it in a drawer. He pulls off the ankle boots and hose, then stuffs them under the bed.

He stills himself, then reaches for the drawer with the pain patches.

Rap.

Rap.

Rap.

Rap.

_So that's how the failsafe works, _he thinks as the door opens on a familiar face. You're caught in a loop until you perform the right actions in order. Like that movie… Oh yes, he has questions. Like hasn't he seen that ring before, on the Doctor's finger? And what is that damn box doing there?


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two – Dirty Faces

"Rassilon, long time no sea salt!" cries the Doctor as he clutches the side of the bed and throws back the covers, slipping out of the bright white soft sheet and blanket in only a dressing gown and pyjama bottoms, which are also white.

Rassilon, First Lord President of Gallifrey, runs a hand through his obsidian hair and manages, somehow, not to goggle his eyes at the idiot descendant who is indeed a trifle too happily engaged in the business of making a fool of him. Him! No one made a fool of Rassilon. Not Her, and certainly not his two _brothers_ _in arms_ on that fateful day he'd done for both of them and grabbed the prize of Power for himself.

"I'll do for you, Doctor," the ancient Gallifreyan spits under his breath, absently rubbing his hand up and down across the Great Key he's hung around his neck, like a mindless trinket. A dangled finding.

Of course they both know what the Key really is. And they both know they know it.

Then, the Doctor smiles. His green eyes ice over, the gaze they hold becoming suddenly the very picture of a frosty morning on Ansypporus 6, a planet of granite trees and jewel-stone oceans whose waters were not water at all, but wave after wave of moving, writhing piles of polished chalcedonies of just that shade and hue, brought to life by the sudden winds that oftentimes caressed the planet's surface.

How appropriate, thinks Rassilon, that the eyes of the descendant should contain the same worlds as the Other himself.

"You failed before. By the way, have you read the Unabridged History of Gallifrey?" asks the Doctor as he too, rubs something large and important, albeit tangible and through his dressing gown, his stomach perhaps, the slight, slight grimace building on his face calculated to bear a curious lack of nonchalance as his thoughts turn to the bookcase across the room. "I'd rather like to point out a passage to you, but see, well…" the Doctor pats his midsection a little too lightly, rather like a child who'd eaten too many sweets, letting the inevitable scene play out just so far in the impossibly old Gallifreyan's vulturistic, circling, steel-trap mind.

"I take it you're not feeling well? A pity…" says Rassilon, and he sweeps over to the bookcase in question, his quick blue eyes scanning the shelves for the required volume. Gods but everything is white in this place. It is becoming quite an irritant to the vision.

The Doctor shrugs his bony body back against the white wall, trying to find just the right spot for his spine, like a squirmy little boy. He says, "You know, Rassilon, how is it that whenever you and I meet, you always feel the need to be a prude? And here I am, still a slim whistler at five months pregnant, and at your mercy. Oh for shame!" He scratches his floppy rabbit hair, grins with a mouth full of teeth reminiscent of his fourth body, then adds, with a twitchy little tic to his lips that makes him almost seem to snarl, "Have you found it yet? I really feel the need to show you that passage. It might prove useful." He wiggles his fingers once for effect as he watches the Lord President search the bottom shelves. "Did I ever say? You have a rather large bum. …don't think I ever did, actually." A pause. That singular curl of lip. A sniff. Then, "Well there it is."

Rassilon could feel the heat rising on his face, a haze of crimson burn on cheeks and chin and everywhere. He'd always been one to blush red when he was in a rage, and this body was no exception. Was the Doctor looking? Let the bastard look. Let him taunt while he could. He is annoying. A mere insect. Yes. Let the little worm crawl with anticipation as he… just then his fingers, tracing the edge of the tall bookstand's bottom ledge, find the thick requested volume. He pulls it out, feeling a tinge of wet surprise after centuries of dry, parched knowing. What was the Lord Doctor, the insect, planning? Or more importantly, why did he feel the need to gloat? And is he truly gloating, or is it another act? Infuriating gnat. Well, no matter. They both know one of them has to die. It was the way of things.

"What passage, Doctor?" said Rassilon, as he flutters meat-clad phalanges over the dusty old sepulcher claiming to be a book and straightens.

The Time Lord on the bed, his back against the wall still, just watches the other man moving. Watches him stiffening, like a bag strung up in a tree, hit by a sudden gust. Or a stick.

Then Rassilon spins. The book flies out of his outstretched hand, slicing an arc toward the Doctor's bed.

The Doctor covers his hand, the one with the ring, turning the band with a brush of his palm. It shifts himto the left, his muscles quivering as he practically vibrates in the proper direction, that was, ever so slightly, to the left. Without looking down, he dabs at the thin slice of blood that had erupted across his side just as the book had smacked past him and into the still shiny but no longer quite so white space behind his skinny, white-draped silhouette. Remembering all, the Doctor's eidetic, inhuman senses soak themselves in the impact of the book, memorizing the dent the old and looking-like-it-ought-to-have-been-rotten thing has made in the polyglass structure of the wall, cataloguing the hairline scratch the pages have cut into his skin. In his mind, he holds the older-seemingman's burning cold gaze like a glass sculpture for the longest time as a matter of course, as regular for the first and mere few seconds of any impromptu staring match. And, the innocent smile he gives Rassilon is new-fallen snow, on a planet neither one of them has ever seen.

Why, then, does it remind them both of the absence of light?


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three – Fight

_The Doctor's memory, part one._

"..but his Eyes were the molten Cores of Suns," quotes the tall, thin, smudge-covered man in the grey and white blouson and red trousers. In one hand is a dark stylus- in the other, a tumbler of deep, ordinary Laxis brand machine oil. Ah, yes, an abysmal rich radiant swallowing black, with just a hint of sparkly bits in, to suit his mood. Swirling the liquid for a flourish or two, the man sets the stylus down and stares over the top of the circle of the glass at another, shorter person in glasses, who had been in the room with him for quite some time. He continues the reading from behind the cup, casting blue-green eyes like furnace flames across a space like any other he's just redecorated with papers and plans and false leads, lighting that other pair of eyes with them as he parts his lips, as though sipping at something, "... and his cloaths were the cloaths of the Moon, for they had little … wait. Are you… _climbing_ over that nice Queen Anne…?"

"Well of course I am!" warbles the dark-haired child he's been staring at. She smiles and props a foot onto the seat of the high-back Meeks Stanton Hall and tips it with her toe, farther, deeper, 'til it shivers on one leg and sinks back under her weight like a swooning woman in a thick bloom of dust and red brocade. She herself sails upright over the chair as it falls, a handsome instance of youth cascading over the carpeting by way of two gangly young legs in yellow suede ankle-boots that are slightly overlarge.

"You look incongruous in those spectacles," the tall man says softly, still clandestinely riveted behind his goblet as the girl runs to him.

Her long fingers bury themselves in the black stains on his shirt like porcelain shattering in reverse, and the glasses on her nose, being black and wide and a bit too big for her delicate button of a nose, smush against his chest, crushing a nipple.

"That's because they're yours, Grandfather!" she giggles, closing her big brown eyes and reaching for his thin face, her touch circling his sharp nose and lips, feeling her way across his scarecrow countenance.

While his granddaughter explores he closes his eyes too, lapping at the pool of her youthful exuberance, however false, like the dying man he doesn't want her to know he is going to be.

"Uncle Dallyrasse gave me a note for you," she murmurs with the acute, dumb animal shyness of a grass-eater as she sticks a hand in the pocket of her delicate lace cape dress. A falsehood he's orchestrated, for his joy is closer to one hundred and fifty than the fifteen she appeared, and wiser than the entirety of the new Council that will soon form in his absence.

At least her beautiful deep chocolate eyes are still closed, no thanks to the gods. If she sees, just for one moment, the look he's wearing, the tears that threaten to reveal themselves like the scent of new water on cracked soil, she'll know in an instant.

_Yes, _he thinks, as he drowns in the touch of his child's child,_ I must never let her know what I'm planning. They are watching us, even now. But they won't hurt her yet, not until they relay my final statement. Which I haven't yet made._

His granddaughter, his Arkytior, opens her eyes to him, then presses the simple, lightweight letter into his long hand, applying just the right pressures to his palm, in a language of touches Rassilon's pets will never guess. Then she grins again, and brushes something away from the corner of his mouth before he can open it again.

"Oh, did I save some for later again? Well, no matter. Why don't you rest yourself while we see what _Uncle_ has given us…" he says, pressing a finger to the girl's forehead. "… and I'm sorry my precious child, but you're not coming with me."

Arkytior feels her short bob of curls begin to follow his finger against her will, but though her young-old eyes glisten at his little betrayal and pour out her bloody understanding like two white holes, she can do nothing to resist his hypnotist's trick, and knows better than to try. Instead, she blinks and falls back, collapsing against him, her hands weakly clutching his black-smudged shirt even as her favorite nurse, a doubly crow-footed bald woman, slightly shorter than he in her usual greyish trousers and a yellow shawl, comes into the lead-lined room, which, conveniently enough, boasts hermetically sealed egressical stone arches on several sides. He watches in silence as her silver-grey eyes, shaped like crescent moons, scan the room, as if hoping to find something. Does she know? She was wearing his cloak earlier…

Préjà vu. And Déjà vu. And Dallyrasse between them. He can just imagine them as caricatures, walking through the park one day in May, like Bunny Fufu. And, much like Bunny Fufu, Dallyrasse enjoys the bopping of heads. Usually off shoulders.

The entire building is like an Escher painting itself really, an exercise in reticular occlusion, all angles and lines and silly staircases leading to entertaining little nowheres. A perfect place to pile his thoughts, to hoard them, really. When Dallyrasse, or, _Lord President Rassilon_ as the man has taken to calling himself, did indeed ask his reasons for building the structure- of course, he'd claimed the over-protectiveness was due to sounds bothering his ears. And, also of course, the only two he loves, trusts, in all of Creation, the two people who now are with him in the no longer safe room he had built to keep away outside dangers the three of them cannot be caught skirting, know better than that. The Lord President's assassins are coming. No hiding anymore. For two of them, at least.

"I thought I told you no pears, Mamlaurea," he rasps, his normally soft voice breaking over the rocks of his intention in a sound like the scratch of nails on glass as he carves the single string of circular letters written on the clean, thick vellum into his memory. Then he cracks his neck and set his shoulders and shakes the letter, dangling it from two lithe fingers as a small, hard and shiny speck clinks on the cream floor. The speck is a Listener, a spying device made to look like a grain of sand idly dropped from a blotted page. Academically, he considers the implicating fruitlessness of curses muttered under the breath, then stamps a foot on the offending machine, which crunches little sparks against his boot. There will be others, after all. The loaded missive is not the last piece in the Game.

He adds, "…now gather together whatever stocks you've piled and carry them back where you got them from. I will take care of the shipping costs, and meet you again later to discuss the cost of the tea. Oh, and the password to the pantry was changed. The new word is Quintet."

The nurse's mercury gaze catches him once before he settles Arkytior in her arms and guides her to the hidden teleport pod across the room, a greyish, soothing sculpture of an unnamed planet and its single moon. One little inset grey button to press, and… the woman and girl disappear in a grey shimmering which lasts only a second. He looks for, and finds, his cloak, a tatty grey thing that had slid from his curled desk to the floor some hours ago.

He resets the coordinates for the Loom's newly-grown catwalk, then steps into the teleport himself, once he's settled his cloak around his shoulders and removed his golden ring to a pocket. The transport winks him away, then winks him into existence again near the bridge, as he'd intended, the air rank with the sound of too many footsteps.

A laugh sticks in his dry throat as he leans over to look at their desperate brainchild, his body dangerously close to the light of the Loom. Naturally, he turns his back to the light, crosses his legs and waits, one hand in his pocket. The likelihood of being tracked through his own personal teleport has always been a part of his calculations, ever since he'd stood with Dallyrasse at the fall of Qqaba, one of the last population III stars. It was one of the last of its kind, a class of stars so massively powerful they were thought to have provided the fuel to build universes. Olmeghidora had apparently not been _lucky _enough to walk away from the resultant implosion, according to Dallyrasse. But Dallyrasse, no, _Rassilon_, just as the legends would say, in time, had sent _Omega_ to his death, in asking him to undertake the mission to fly into the core of Qqaba and collapse it while failing to relay the fact he could not survive. Strange how an engineer as capable as Omega could have missed that bit.

Only a moron would have missed that he'd be Rassilon's next sacrifice to the cause, another unknowing martyr. And he, being the Other, would play Redstone. There is always a way. As guards with guns crowd at both sides of the bridge overlooking the Loom, he raises a hand and tips an imaginary hat to them, then falls back over the side as though taking a swim, his fingers racing to uncrumple the small note Arkytior had hidden in his pocket as he plummets.

He is falling. The paper comes uncrushed in his fingers and he smiles. Bright girl… must have put it in when his cloak had slipped to the floor from of the corner of his curl-leaf desk.

The words hurt to read. So bright, the heat. So bright, the promises. So white. So white the words, like suns behind his eyes.

But he reads them.

"_Grandfather, I understand._

_Mamlaurea will know you, and so will I._

_And we'll be waiting."_

The Light comes for him, tearing everything away. Scattering his elements. And as the shadows of men and women gather at the crest of the bridge, they watch his body singe itself within the Loom, the blackening smile of a rose in flames, noting that, long after the great life-giving machine had digested the rest of his grey cloak, the page written in his granddaughter's hand had been the last thing to sink beneath the waves.

In the wake of their failure, they all run away, not wishing to be Rassilon's food. And so, no one is left to notice the shadow stooping down to pick up the…


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four: Heavy In Your Arms

Once Rassilon has, typically, stormed off, the Doctor huffs, letting out a long-held breath, then lifts his dressing gown to check the bloody slash. His fingers probe near the cotton-like fabric, left hand holding back a hem which would still hang to his knees even if he wasn't pregnant, right hand smoothly palpating the line of orange-ish blood the razor pages of the book thrown at him have cut into his stomach.

Quick as the wink on a fly, the screech of a stool's metal feet near his dressing table made itself obvious, and, suddenly enough, he could smell the crispy, porky smell of bacon.

"… I Brought you a Buttered Bacon Sarnie. In person. 'assilon doesn't get any Because he's a smarmy elitist Bastard," growls the crumpled figure on the stool, taking special, gritted care to enunciate the B's.

Well, it's rather more a pile -namely a pile of grey hoodie over dark jeans and naked ankles stuffed in red Converse- than a person at that point, but it _was _holding out a nice plateful of yummy big sandwich…

_Mmm… smoky red bacon… juicy green tomato and crisp butter lettuce… thick sliced sharp yellow cheddar... Red, green, and yellow. _Ah, it reminds of his first regeneration's time amongst the Maya… or had it been the Inca? The Aztec? Olmec? Toltec? Mixtec? KitchenAid? In any case, the Doctor feels genuinely touched. As for which numbered definition applied in the official galactic dictionary, he'll leave that up to the Master.

"Oh I don't know… I think I _particularly enjoyed_ this latest tantrum of his," the Doctor says, tilting his rabbit hair back as he pulls his dressing gown over his head and points to the dresser. Then he says, "Say, Kos', do you mind finding me something to wear? I'm a growing boy, and too big for bending over at the moment."

With a forced scowl the Master bends over the Bombay behind him with the plate still in one hand, then begins yanking out drawers as though expertly gutting a fish. His long hands, like a pianist's, trawl through bits of lace and frilly shirts. He stops, drags a plain one out and holds it up, examining the billowy, surprisingly subtle poet-shirt sleeves in the double sunlight.

"This ought to afford you some movement, should things get messy…" he muses through the childish, permanent frown Lucy had always called charming, licking his lips in the nervous frustration to be somewhere else, anywhere, hitting something. Preferably Rassilon. "…it's light enough. And you're only as big as a human five-months gone, so why don't you wear it, over the pyjama bottoms? You're going to be riding or hunting _something, _anyway." He indicates the stripes on the Doctor's sleep trousers, which vaguely resembled riding jodhpurs, as they had a slight, elegant rounding out near the middle of the thigh.

The Doctor holds out his hand, his green peridot eyes quirking in quiet pride at the Master's display of affection. He rubs his neck, pinches his nose, rolls his shoulders a few times before getting completely out of bed.

"Well, looks like another nightie without the cut, but it'll have to do I s'pose. Good choice. It's more modern than the 1800's ver…" he stops on purpose, studying the Master's face for a spell before continuing. "Oh go on, then," he adds, sticking a hand in the air and waggling his fingers and twisting his wrist. "I'll be along for the conference in a few tics. I can see it's murdering you to be in the same room with me for more than a fiver; Go and stalk Pasmo or something. Just don't put _too_ many tacks in his chair. I still enjoy his company."

Koschei of Oakdown, the Master, the present Lord President of Gallifrey peers at the Doctor from his perch on the stool, glaring out from his sad little cave of greyish fabric, and shook. His body is indeed coiled- but not like a snake, oh no, more like a spring than any sort of Ophidian serpent. Reaching round and blowing his nose on a random shirt from the drawer, he then spins and offers a quick retort to the silence before vacating the room through the leftmost exit, still carrying the plate with the sarnie. Then he stops, looks at the drippy bacon sandwich on the plate, and rages back into the Doctor's room. Faced by the Doctor's suspiciously starry smile, he blows past the gingerly dressing Time Lord with turn on a penny care and slams the dish down on the bed.

"FINE! You're better than I am at being a manipulative, Othering twat! NOW STOP SMIRKING AND EAT THE BLOODY SARNIE!"

The Doctor grins, and his soft call-out of, "If you really can't stand the sight of me, next time bring an apple with a face on! .. _and maybe some ngona oil to shoehorn yourself out of the oven!_" follows the Master out of the room like a cloak of bad luck, courtesy of the empty hall corridor's acoustic arches and sidewalls. When he can no longer hear the sound of the Master's relieved bickering, he wraps his fingers around the nice heavy sandwich and takes his first big scandalous bite. Then, with the delicious tall sarnie in his mouth, he balances the plate on one arm, picks up his coat in the other, and strides off out of his own door in bare feet.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five: Vignette

Canton Everett Delaware checks his silver watch, then gazes again at the reflection of himself in the unrelieved blackness of the dwarf star alloy block prison.

The Doctor is late.

Which, knowing what Canton now knows, could mean only one thing.

A double entendre of galactic proportions.

The first time the Doctor had shown up with a beard had been about five months ago after the revelation of the Silence, no Ponds in sight, looking half-way between panic and elation. He'd said he was late. Then he'd explained further. And elaborated. With hand signs. Then he'd told Canton about the dwarf star alloy box. And they'd gone for a quick run in the TARDIS, picking out baby things and straitjackets in the 51st century. Damn but the alien was unique. And good for a laugh. The slightly-mad, but decent, type. Then they'd gone somewhere called Gallifrey for about three minutes, and the Doctor had come back three months older with a bit more weight on him.

"Erm, had to tell the father… turned into something of a quickie. Right then! Back into the jacket and beard," he'd said. Then they'd returned to Area 51.

That had been then.

As the TARDIS comes in silent for the second time, he steps back while the ship adjusts an infinite array of physical and sub-physical differentials which he will never begin to understand or care about. All he knows was that another version of the Doctor has come to take the place of the one in their little black box, and _his_ Doctor will leave. Which is what they all want, for one reason or another. Besides, soon the _bodies_ will arrive, and the jig will be up.

They have to get this done before then. It's what the Doctor said. Well, one of him, anyway.

The alien appears just as the doors of his blue time ship open, and he looks anything but calm. He is, however, thinner than the one who's been chained in the chair.

"There's no time to waste, boys," says Canton with a smile for the older, clean-shaven Doctor, as he pats the younger Doctor, -the bearded one-, on the shoulder. Frowning, he watches the younger version lean with his eyes closed for a moment on the TARDIS doors, and sets his jaw. "You really oughta eat more. Think of the kid and do that. Get some sleep. And hurry it up with that straight jacket, Houdini. The Ponds will be here soon."

"Yeah, ah, sorry… but remember, I was a tad ill during the first bit. You know how it goes, old boy!" says the younger Doctor with a wink, watching with interest as the older Doctor grows the exact same beard, mustache and overcast of hair as he is still wearing. "Everything in place, me?"

The older Doctor grins beneath the hair, then nods. "Down to the color of bowtie I'm wearing. The TARDIS is preset- which is good, 'cause the thing we don't want is you bouncing about too much. Not good for the…"

"…baby, yes, yes I know! A quick pop-over to my surprise -Honestly did they really believe I would be surprised but I appreciate it, regardless!- birthday dinner at Francine's and then back to Gallifrey for the big chalupa. Oh lord don't let me say that again without a side of decent rice, chalupa… but anyway thanks a bunch!" quips the younger Doctor, finishing the older him's sentence as he gingerly steps up to the TARDIS, making use of the handy two-step stool his future self had so thoughtfully brought out and employed while tying his shoes.

Then Canton reaches down and picks up the stool, handing it to him with a grin and a nod, if just a touch too soberly. "Take care, Doctor. And have this banana on me." He takes a nice ripe yellow one out of a pocket and sticks that in the alien's free hand.

The older Doctor in the chair just smiles and rolled his shoulders, settling into the straight jacket as his younger self leans carefully out of the TARDIS' double egress with a full bishop-sleeved hand on his barely there stomach, the banana already half-eaten and sticking from his mouth. Two months in the box have got him up to seven, and he still only looks a slim four months and change.

"Oh, Canton, you're just a big sweetheart! Thank you ever so much for the lovely vacation in sunny downtown Area 51! I needed the break, and a laugh... and the cheek on you! Make me blush, you naughty thing! Okay, then- Self, Canton, no time to lose, so thank you and g'bye and see you later!"

Just like that, the younger Doctor is gone with a little hand wave and the roar of the TARDIS engines.

Once the younger Doctor has gone…

Canton looks at the Doctor.

The Doctor looks at Canton.

Then both men smile, counting their time until the prison break.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six: It's There For the Weight, Dear

Once more the seat of power ( for the moment), the great Panopticon of the Time Lords rings with the voices of the Council… and today, as on most days, a good portion of the Time Lords gathered generally try their utmost to avoid drawing the Master's… _the Lord President's_ attention. The few who arebrave enough to cast a glance his way often find him either pacing the floor before the Lord President's Chair or glaring down at them all like a mad priest from what he calls 'that ludicrous pulpit'.

Today, the Lord President merely sits cross-legged and slumped on a table, watching osprey-eyed as men and women whisper together, shuffle cards or play Sepulchasm in the aisles.

He is waiting for the Doctor. The missing piece that will explain the puzzle they'd all been trying to solve. What has happened to Lady Flaminarixodaparcaftion, the former Kithriarch of the House of Paradox.

"Does anyone know if the Master, I mean the Lord President, intends to…"

"Yes, yes! Intends to what?"

"…intends to do something with that bit of the old Spaceport sticking out of what's left of the ceiling? Surely they don't mean to keep it stuck there indefinitely. Ever since the end of the War, what with all the debris winking about and landing Other knows where it's been perched up there like a huge Tafelshrew dropping in a cobweb."

"Well you'd better not talk about the Master that way, Pasmodius, or he might make it drop on you."

"Pasmo has always had dung for brains; I don't see how the Master making the fact an entendre could be such a grand improvement." Nemontiarla says, her tiny voice entirely in agreement with her tiny face.

"Be grateful, Nemontiarla! I remember the Dark Times, when there were no buffets at official functions! We didn't HAVE Flutterwing breast stuffed with starhoney dressing! We had bread! And fungus!"

"Those weren't the Dark Times, you congealed old tosser! That was last week!"

"Well, at least he keeps us honest."

"Who, the Master? Oh please, say you weren't speaking of Pasmo."

"I was speaking of the Doctor, Keflistian."

"So was I, Kenny."

"The Doctor couldn't keep us out of a paper bag. The Time War proved that."

"He Time Locked us, didn't he, Raspar? And defeated Rassilon alongside the Master? Oh yes, I can see where you must be confused. The Doctor obviously prevented several perfectly stable timelines from being born just so he could flaunt his inability to lead. Really! I think the fact we're still alive and rebuilding is proof enough of his competence and intention, don't you?"

", surely you aren't going to move FOR the Doctor to be re-instated in any meaningful capacity?"

"Oh yes, Raspar, I can and I will. And do call me Kenny. Everyone else does. Especially the Doctor."

"Ha! I knew you had sided with that fraud! He brought the Master here to smite us all!"

The Master cocks his head; now here was a party worth crashing. As he looks idly back and forth at the faces gathered for free food, games of Sepulchasm and the pursuit of argument before the promised Fall, he watches them all some more. He's been watching them all day, rubbing a finger back and forth over the gold ring. One can never afford NOT to watch them. Any of them. They are Time Lords.

The first speaker, a white haired, young-faced man had, of course, been Kenny. Not so much an idiot at first glance as Pasmo, in any case. But Pasmo was of the House of Lineacrux, the senile old schemer. Even his hair has wrinkles, what little of it he has left. Long past due a regeneration, that one. But still- what had the Doctor said about his dealings with House Lineacrux during the War? Ah yes…'Never trust a senile old fool, because your throat is as likely to catch his dagger as his spittle.'

Hiding his amusement behind a glare only two women and the Doctor have ever enjoyed, the Master jumps down from the table, then jumps benches and chairs until he is standing right above the two bickering Time Lords Raspar and Kenny, balancing like a tightropist on the back of a chair in his red Converse.

The two men stand up; they haven't counted on the Master being interested. In them, anyway.

"Why don't you explain for me then, Raspar, exactly why you seem so intent on demeaning the Doctor's good name?" the Master says, stepping down and rearranging Raspar's high-pointed blue collar, "I don't care about mine; I don't have one. But the Doctor is a goodie-goodie who's died countless times so that you lot can sit on your arses and play Time Lord pinochle." He stands, smiling now, one hand dancing a heavy silver coin back and forth across his knuckles.

"Oh, look here's his Lordship Rassilon the Cardinal over the comms again. What's it this time? Has he got a wedgie?"

"Well, personally I think it's funny that the Master made him Cardinal. Don't you, Kenny?"says peacock-haired, effeminate Keflistian, getting up suddenly to dust off his trousers. But it seems Kenny has choked on a fish bone… rendering himself momentarily indisposed and coughing up blood on Keflistian's robe. So Keflistian pats him on the back, wishes him a good regeneration and then walks off, in the direction of the disrobing room.

The comms crackle nostalgically with a warning. "Intruder in the Citadel! Silver mask, blond hair! Don't let him make it to the…"

But a bowtied shadow pops into existence near one of the exits , a green-tipped sonic probe in hand. He raises the probe in the air; it blinks red, and then the comms spark, going silent, and he blips out again just as old Pasmo turns with a swish of robes to stare at the empty space the shadow no longer occupies.

The Master yells in frustration at the cracking-fizzing interference. "Bit late, 'my Lord Cardinal! A bit of forewarning would have been nice!"

Then he blinked as he watches the scene unfolding before him, eyes widening, because every Time Lord in the Panopticon was suddenly clutching at their throats and stumbling and collapsing over themselves like silk curtains with legs.

Something they ate, most probably. Idiots. He silently thanked the Doctor for putting the idea in his head not to attend to the rich fare laid out so enticingly on several tables.

There is Pasmo to the right, a general amusement and strangely artless dodger one can always see coming in the heliotrope purples of the Chapterhouse Patrex, gasping and choking and generally re-enacting Gettysburg inside his scrawny esophagus. The most creative he's ever been since joining up with all those damn artists and decorators. Eventually, he falls behind a table.

The Master stifles a laugh.

"What a pity," he says, hopefully covering his surprise in time to avoid seeming soft while lagging the muscles of his face just enough to let them all know that he isn't the one who Done It. He highly doubts that anyone will believe him, of course. No one except the optical cameras he had implanted in all of them during the routine examinations the Doctor had implemented to combat any recurrences of wartime diseases. As he brings out a holographic tablet and checks the data streaming in from all those tiny protein cameras, he smiled to himself. No one knows he's hotwired them to the ring… feeding him real time news. He hums to himself. Even if he can't remember why he has it, or who gave it, it's helping him to keep his eye on things. Normally he wouldn't be so trusting, but.. for some reason… but there is no time to consider the origins of the ring. He has work to do.

"It's obviously a warning from our little friends. Idiots. Never touch the free food. Anyway, just regenerate and you'll all be dandy again- it's just a slight dosing of aspirin cut with cyanide- meaning that some of your vital enzymes were inhibited. You all should be lucky I'm such a good boy now," he says, clapping as the whole group gives a collective gasp, then regenerates almost at once in a rather appealing light show of golds and greens and blues and the occasional rainbow sparkler.

, with long blue hair now and green slashes of makeup like a Tromellian whore, is the first to come swaying up like a drunkard, bruising himself on overturned tables as he trips up the circular stairs to where the Master is standing. He coughs, and bits of gold light shove out in broken semaphore, looking for all the world as though he's swallowed a torch.

"Lord President, should we inform the Doctor now, or when he arrives?" says Nemontiarla.

The Master scowls at her, because the regeneration has got rid of her lovely silver eyes and replaced them with red ones. She looks, he remarks to himself, quite like the Albino from the Shadow Proclamation(excepting the straight brown hair and the affinity for old books), only in the cheerful grey and silver of her Chapterhouse. Ah, good old, reliable, politically atrophied Dromieans. There is also, he notes as he takes in her dusty form and clothes, a spec of Caltreevian plaster from the ceiling motif in her hair.

So he grabs her by her silver-banded arms and kisses her hard.

"You've been doing some out of sequence mural work on the roof again," he says, grinning as she blushed. " … well keep at it. The Doctor will be thrilled. He has a thing for the hands-on approach."

He can't place her… why can't he…

She blushes more, her cheeks filling like candied apples from Earth. Brainless, repressed tart. She fancies both of them. Oh well, at least he'll have a pet librarian in his pocket, just like the Doctor. And speaking of Earth, how he longs for a nice bit of beef... and he still hasn't got the Doctor back for pretending he was the baby's father. Things to do, things to do.

"Plus," he says, sweeping a hand around her back and retrieving the small bit of plaster perched in her messy bun, "I think Caltreevian plaster suits you."

He examines the whitish chunk for a moment, noticing the blues and greens that flowed over the small bit that had managed some color. There's an intricate rose pattern over one edge. Not bad work for a library mouse.

Nemontiarla hunches her shoulders in a modest shrug, and one bangle slides from her upper arm down onto her wrist. "Well, the Caltreevians _did _imbue it with trace amounts of validium, which as we all well know is what TARDISES are formed of, and is thusly well able to withstand regenerative energy expenditure," she murmured.

His hand traces her chin; she giggles like a school girl behind thick glasses she, and practically every other Gallifreyan ever, will never need.

Then he kisses her softly and throws her to the ground. It's like breaking a toy, he imagines. As he feels the knife slide into his left heart, he smiles at her. _See, Theta, _he muses to himself, _I can be beautiful. You just… watch me, you… goody-goody… bastard._

"You should run, my little bookworm," he sighs through bloodying teeth, "Go find the Doctor. And stay alive. We don't want you… getting this present, too…"

He struggles against the growing darkness, willing himself to regenerate as he sinks to the steps and saw Nemontiarla backing away from him. Why isn't it happening?

Then a man in a silver mask with a mess of blond hair leans close and whispers, "In the name of Lady Flamina and House Paradox, I claim the Restoration for our side, Heathen!"

What is this? _Shakespeare in Love_? The moron. That voice, though…

The Master laughs, but it's really just a gurgle in his throat. He doesn't expect the Time Lords to stop this, but still.. it will at the very least be nice not to feel it as the dagger plunges through his other heart…

The last thing he hears is the Cardinal's voice, booming from out of nowhere.

_Good girl. Ha-ha…ha. You brought the biggest bastard of them all,_ he thinks as he drifts down into a bloodloss-induced kip.

"Oh I think not, you squeaking little rat," says Rassilon, grinning like a vampire at midday lunch. "…you're standing on my seal."

If anyone sees him lean to pick up the silver ring the Terrorist dropped, they do not say.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven: The Cake is a Lie; Long Live the Jammie Dodger

The Doctor throws open the TARDIS doors and steps out, careful to turn around and lock her properly instead of using his clicker. Or snapping his fingers. She'd shocked him for it… He'd learned not to snap too often, after that.

Feeling his feet touch solid ground, he closes his eyes and lets himself revel in the touch of the wood under his squarish, not quite slim fingers.

"Wait a moment. That doesn't smell remotely like chocolate cake," he says, sounding confused even to his own ears as he takes a backstep away from the TARDIS.

One more step backward.

But his naked foot doesn't touch floor first, oh no. It sinks a little, and he can feel something cool and wet. And slightly sticky.

He can feel what it is through his clothes. He can smell it on his skin, the instant recognition seeping through his body. Has the TARDIS taken him back to Gallifrey already? Gallifrey. Gallifrey? Gallifrey! Of course Gallifrey. Idiot.

He looks down, and sees only the marble floor, and the vermillion of Time Lord blood in a pattern like spilt paint beneath his feet.

Suddenly there is a tugging at his sleeve. He looks around, but sees only the Master's body. He clutches his head, trying to stave off the creep of a vascular headache that so often accompanies such flashes of shared pain and failing miserably as the tugging fingers? It is fingers, isn't it? pull at his shirt again.

"Are you Jesus?"

Oh lord. And there's a palm-leaf motif on the floor tiles, too. Oh joie de vivre.

He's forgotten to get rid of the extra hair! And the flowing shirt and striped sleeping trousers aren't helping much. Nor the naked feet.

As he looks down, he manages a hastily-concocted reply to the young brown-haired boy who is staring up at him, one hand wrapped firmly in a fist on the hem of his bishop sleeve shirt.

"That, Georgie Plombkins, is an unsubstantiated rumour!"

Then the headache blows up in his face; no blood anywhere he looks. No body, no Panopticon, no assassin with that gaudy silver bear's mask… Was it a vision? The last time he'd one of those had been when… oh lord have mercy, when the Lord President of Gallifrey had been assassinated. He'd been in his fourth body… tried to warn them. Naturally, he'd been blamed.

But this headache, now… it isn't his pain; it's Koschei's.

His eyes in a sea of blackness now, he lurches out with fumbling hands, aware of only blobs of light and flowers of heat. Red and blue here, blonde here.. sandy white here… silky champagne there… really, does Francine have any other colors of blouse? Not that it's a bad look for her- he find it rather elegant, fitting even.

He sinks lower.

A pair of strong male hands grips his sleeve; it seems as if the boy was touching his cheek. The adorable little thing. Hopefully he hasn't scared him too badly.

Long fingers smack his face, trying to waken him. Oh dear, had he said that about Francine out loud?

Soon, someone is talking, but not to him, thank the stars, and other hands are feeling around in places... his neck, his wrist, looking for and finding the double pulse. Then they find the baby. A hesitation, then, a solid pressing of palm against his stomach, followed by a gentle pat. Must be Jack. Could be Mickey? But there seem to be wrinkles… wait! There were slightly longer nails, the scent of perfume… was it… no! Grace? Grace Holloway! N***, couldn't be.

"Georgie, go get a juice bottle. Martha! Mickey, a little help here!"

"No no, it's a vision, I'm feeling someone else's… it's not the baby! Something's happened and I have to get back, I have to…"

Francine's voice now, cutting through the fog. "Be quiet and do as you're told."

"Yes, mam!" he croaks, evoking a tiny snort from at least one of the owners of the pairs of hands palpating his body for bruises or injury.

_Oh well,_ he thinks, as his hair shortens itself a little and his face cleans up of stubble and his body becomes like an anchor somewhere beneath him due to the lapsing control over his conscious, _at least he's arrived at all. Or has he? Since when has the TARDIS used semi-tangible capable of weight-bearing four-dimensional interactive incomplete-quantum-state multi-function diagnostic holograms? The naughty thing! He's been inside her the whole time! Ha HA!_

"Happy Birthday, Me we'll have to leave till later. Face, say hello to the TARDIS grates. SEXY…" He pets the small bit of the console he can reach, the base of an industrial mixer. "SEXY, you know what … to do…follow the presets over the river and… through the woods. To Gallifrey we go."

Funny how the best place for him and his condition during a bumpy ride is the very place he's fallen, wedged tight-as-you-please between the crash seat –which has mysteriously moved closer- and the console, which hasn't. _"Not my mother, indeed,"_ he chuckles as he drifts off to sleep. _Well, maybe on Sundays._

On his finger, a golden ring hums as his face smushes against it…


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight: Pierrot

The man in the silver mask steps back from the great Rassilon, one foot behind the other as though performing some kind of renaissance walking dance.

His shoes are ankle boots and green; his blond hair falls in a pleasant cascade behind him, curling as he moves like the weights in a good cloak. His movements, Rassilon notes with a decided distaste, have the sickly-sweet grace of a masquerade performer. To say nothing of the ridiculous mask.

_And oh,_ he reasons, behind his false amusement, _this little upstart is going to be so much fun in the squashing. Can he even still take a proper joy in the snuffing of such a tiny little bug? _

It is time to find out. He's never been one for anything but chess. And he feels a reasonable degree of certainty that the descendant of the only man he'd ever deigned to play chess with is nowhere in sight. The ingrate.

"You know, it's rather sad that the Doctor isn't here to see you fall a second time, oh Great Lord Rassilon," says the trespasser, his silver mask gleaming ridiculously as he takes a half-step forward and circles with the tip of his foil. "… there's no accounting for taste in compatriots or enemies, is there?"

Rassilon stares at him, this mouse who thinks he is a cat, undecided whether to call him Romeo or Juliet. Or moron. That was the Master's favorite at all the official assemblages… not that these poor, mentally amputated excuses for Time Lords could ever measure up to the great minds that had held the Pythia at bay in times of old. Ah,but for nostalgia. He relishes, to himself, the thought of finally discussing that meaningless passage with the Doctor, once the little idiot is back within reach.

"I am the Terrorist, Rassilon. You will bow before our House and release Lady Flamina, whom you hold in the cells, or we will destroy the Restoration from within!"

Rassilon throws back his head and laughs; it was a throaty laugh, but chiming, almost cheerful. It is the chortle of the first Lord of Time,and it flowed like water through the hall, filling every ear. No one moved.. .but wait! Who was that, slinking behind the so-called Terrorist like a skinny streetling hoping for a full purse?

Perhaps he would give the lurker time to slit their own throat, or amuse him by taking care of a pest problem. Whichever came first.

"What Restoration? Have you seen the state of this place? They're all idiots! I failed. I don't care one lick about these puppies now. For that matter, as soon as I am done serving my time as Cardinal to the Master, I shall go back to sleep within my tomb. I have had enough of the waking world. Between the Doctor and the Master, I am spent."

"Coward!" a shrivelled voice cries from behind the upstart dandy in green and silver.

The Terrorist almost turns; but the old man behind him is quicker.

"Pasmodius? But how? You're just a stupid old…"

The dagger blooms from the idiot dandy's chest; soon the young man in green and silver sink to the floor. But as they crowd around him, his finger nudges something on his hand- a golden ring, then slumps in mid teleport and vanishes, to the fury of the guards.

Rassilon smiles. He had noticed the old man's obscene lurching gait, even as Pasmodius had stalked his prey. "You stole my break-fast of blood, _old man_. Tell me," He is attentive now, even anxious, but he dares not let it show. Things are becoming interesting after all. "Did you enjoy your kill?"

"Bah. Too stringy; all meat no brains. When I was young, we used to hunt Giant Tafelshrews in packs of three to six Cousins," the codger mutters as he cleans his blade on the Terrorist's gaudy green undershirt with a nod to Rassilon and a cracking back for his troubles. Then he sits himself down on one of the few benches which haven't been overturned in the mass regeneration earlier and slumps with a satisfied harumph, perhaps wisting after a good cheese pie.

"He's on about it again, my Lord Cardinal! Why don't we give him a sedative and cart him to the Infirmary along with the Master so the rest of us can clean up?" says Kenny –whose fishnet-slashed sleeves hang just past his official robes, not to mention his arms, being a bit too long for him now- as he pats old Pasmo on the elbow.

But Pasmodius is already snoring.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine: One Flew Over Nurse Ratchett

"I suspect they'll find the real Pasmo unconscious in the Tomb of Rassilon," the Doctor says evenly, his pregnant body precariously horizontal across the arms of his favorite chair, a genuine crimson-backed Meeks Stanton Hall, his square face pale with subsumed rage. His angry jaw, however, rocks back and forth infrequently, grinding like the steel in a bear trap as he recounts just exactly what he has been doing since the Master's injury one month before. "The guards were flabbergasted when I explained how the Terrorist had managed the switch." He holds up his own golden ring, and the Master's.

The Master, shirtless and propped in a chair with some elegant yellow silk pillows behind him, is anything but impressed. "Those damn rings again. My brain feels like Swiss cheese. And, switch? Really? You mean, all those bad jokes the old geezer told us… that was… And _what_ did you _explain _to them, exactly, Theta? Your arse doesn't look half bad in those skinny black jeans, by the way. Even if it did, you'd be sexy in a plastic bag."

The Doctor smirks, gets up, rubs his bum, spanks one buttock, then dusts off and drapes himself gingerly back over the chair again. His fingers drift over the buttons near the bottom hem of his long shirt, the fabric straining just enough over his stomach to accentuate rather than detract.

"Obviously, when I saw the pod in the Panopticon, and put it together with the fact of Keflistian's unfortunate discovery and the relevant footage from your amusing little See See Tee Vee experiment, I came to the only reasonable conclusion." He adjusted his tie, this one a rabbit hued number the same color as his hair, tied nice and straight against his unpopped collar. "We ought to discover who gave us these rings, Koschei… although, we probably never will. That's what the failsafe must have been, a temporary death differential mnemonic buffer against fraying all of time and space. Before all this, it might have been fun to play with. Basically, whoever it was turned us into isometric schwarzchild radii for our own personal memories. We've been playing Manchurian Candidates in someone's greater Game, Kos. I mean to find out why."

The Master opens his mouth to complain that the Doctor has suspiciously _not _given his usual emaciated answer to a relatively important question, but Rassilon's voice booming from the too-audible comms runs rather roughshod over his attempts to be heard.

"Would the Other please report to the Cardinal's apartment? Thank you. Rassilon out."

The Doctor stiffens at his old moniker, feeling suddenly, inexplicably dizzy at the strange announcement, while the beautiful red damask-like pattern on the chair back gives a foreboding shripping sound behind him. Had he heard a slight snicker at the end of Rassilon's broadcast? He can't seem to get his brain to stop spinning the room around… the scent of roses is deafening. Why can't the Master smell it?

Meanwhile, the Master watches in horror as the wood in the chair splinters, arches out beside his friend's prostrate body and breaks, collapsing the legs out from beneath him and sending the Doctor straight down to the floor with a yelp of pain as his spine strikes hard marble.

Then, just as he is contemplating how he is to manage getting down on the floor to check on the Doctor, the Cardinal's voice starts to come over the comms again. But before the comms can give their second address, the Master lifts a large shard of wood, straining his small ability with telekinesis as he flings it at the comm control panel near the door, the small blue panel fizzing in a shower of sparks as it is pierced.

The Master feels sick as he looks down at the Doctor. The unfortunate man lies moaning and sprawled on his back, his hair longer than usual, some ends just longish enough for jagged bits to peek around the base of his ears, although most of it is halfway to his shoulders in some sort of boyish layer. Despite the child growing in his womb, in the face he looks a child himself, with hooded, bright eyes and a thin, girlish upper-lip pout.

"Idiot!" he croaks before regaining his composure. "You lose that baby and our leverage is gone, and the Restoration after it!" He continues in a roar, shaking with equal parts rage and concern so that his entire frame seems to quiver with the need to spit.

"…oh that hurt. But on the upside, I got a kink out!" says the Doctor, happy to roll his shoulders as something in his spine cracks disturbingly. Then he blinks and cranes his neck to gaze at the Master, who, obviously, is fretting his dark eyes out. "You know, Kos'…" he says, the words jovial and gentle and profound, the voice so soft, so precisely adequate it could have spent a lifetime under his breath, "…you look like Rassilon when you do that. The middle year students will be calling _you _the Spit Lord, next."

"So I'm one-upping Rassilon already? Good to know. Hrm… should I be bothered enough to afford our usual fans a field trip to the cells?" the Master queries, letting his breathing ease up at the sound of so much of the Doctor's voice.

"Meh. I don't know… have they really been so terrible, Koschei? Most of them are just brilliant kids, being stupid. There are a few kinks in the linen that have nothing to with my fall, though…" The Doctor pats the broken bits of chair, then rolls himself over onto his side, propped up by a scuffed elbow. "One of them being that if a guard doesn't come soon, I'll have to take my tea on the floor." He inclines his head toward the robin's egg blue teacup and saucer sitting on the small table just out of his free arm's reach.

"And the other point?" asks the Master, as the sound of heavy boots come close. _Finally, some help for the accident-prone prawn. _

The Doctor smiles then, and it was not a pleasant sight, for when his gaze meets the Master's full on, his entire face seeming to darken and turn down, his green eyes burning like dark diamonds of spring. "It all fit for me once I completed an eidetic scan of the camera footage from your optical implants. Remember when my biodata from the Matrix was used to imply my presence and subsequent involvement during the murder of my House Tree's Kithriarch? Well… I suspect something similar has happened here, and it might not have ended with Keflistian. Therefore, the question we should ask is not _who is_ the Terrorist, but _who_ did he _see during his murder_? If he had your little science fair project in him anywhere, I didn't find it." He pauses for effect, and to massage the magnificent knot forming on the back of his thigh. "I rather think the darkness obscuring the answer to that question might be lit somewhat better if we could get that pod down and examine it. What do you think, Master?"

The Master considers it. Better plan than his, if a trifle too simple. He's been hoping for a chance to knock some heads, namely because he's been far too tolerant recently, and having to be so sugary sweet during tense negotiations was grating on his nerves. "Save it. The guards are here," he murmurs, clawing the air in emphasis to get the men coming into the room to tend the Doctor first. "The Doctor's fallen and bruised himself- no no, on that stupid chair, can't you see? Of all the brainless… I want him looked over by someone who knows prenatals."

The guards blink in confusion as they look from the Doctor to the Master and back to the Doctor again. The Master is simply too angry to get words out, and the Doctor keeps trying to cover a laugh by snorting, which doesn't work at all. Then he winces and rubs the small of his back. Moment lost.

"What the Master means to say is that he believes me to need the services of a gynecologist or midwife. Or a nurse. Or the requisite doctor. To check me over. I'm growing a time tot in here!" Slowly, for emphasis, he tugs the hem of his trim white clubber shirt up to show them, then pats his exposed bump. "You know, fetus, baby, offspring, infant, spawn? Little thing that crawls, looks cute," The Doctor pauses, gesticulating in a precisely the size of a four-month-old human toddler with his fingers, "… eats and wails, then grows up to be maximally annoying but inherently useful and sadly, not necessarily endearing but always worthy of second chances out of pity or compassion? Sort of like you lot- only adorable." He mentions it casually, as if chipping the golf ball into the sand trap on purpose, then looks over to throw a quick wink at the Master before the guards remember themselves enough to pick him off the floor and help him outside into the hallway.

"The Infirmary's that way, morons!" yells the Master as he throws one of the yellow chair pillows out into the hall in the proper direction. "Hey! You! Don't let him walk- carry him! Bloody ingrates!"

Everything will be fine now, the Master tells himself. The Doctor is notorious for at least attempting to bring out the best in almost any situation under his control. Why, then, had he, the Master of all save one, felt such relief when the troupe of guards finally did as he'd wished and turned around?


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten: Old Man of the Sea

It has been an hour already, but Pasmodius, long time Cousin of the House Lineacrux, of the Chapterhouse of Patrex, still stands outside the Infirmary door. He is waiting. And listening. As he has been for a while. After all, no one listened to an old fool, not really anyhow. No one. Ever. Paid. Much. Attention. Not then, and not now.

He's even made it easy for them, inserting himself as a blatant contradiction – the Patrex Chapterhouse! Of course it was brilliant, despite not being entirely his doing- into the House of Lineacrux line, Lineacrux, a House whose members were renowned for the dubious honour of being underestimated due to members' propensity to adopt an aged appearance, the very appearance the Assassin had striven to cultivate in the long months prior to the start of the so-called Restoration.

As for the other hand of contradiction, no one ever paid attention to anyone of the Patrex Chapterhouse; it was why the Assassin had chosen it. Rassilon had seen the disguise's potential immediately. And that was like never being seen at all. Just like the Other in the War. Oh yes, he can take a page.

Like he is right now.

Old Pasmo would of course, bring and so has brought, a selection of easily spirited eats to such a watch, the whole procedure being more fun than an old dodger like himself has any right having. Perhaps a nice pickled smallfish from his pack…


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven: Bonito Flakes

"What do you feed them, anyhow?"

"What?"

"Babies you moron!"

"…that was uncalled for."

"Oh you Othering snipe! Just answer the bloody question!"

"How should I know?"

"…you mean you don't? Bloody hell! Since you're going to have one and ruin my lives, don't you think you ought to?"

"…No."

"You are so joking. You're having me on! You're having me on…"

"No. But If I did name it… hrm… maybe I'll name it after the third moon of Poosh, you know the one."

"Yes, the one Davros borrowed out from under your nose because you were busy snogging that blonde chit? Well, better wrap a gun up for baby's birthday then, because it's gonna shoot itself on exit."

"..."

"Oh right, sorry. _She's _off-limits. Moving on, do try to refrain from throwing large objects at my head in future. If you wish to keep yours. Remember I am Lord President."

"… empty threat. You're a teddy bear. A big, angry teddy bear. And, furthermore, I know you are but what am I?"

"Gaaah! Where is that damn physician I asked for?"

"Oh Koschei, really… there aren't any general health practitioners on Gallifrey, remember? I'm the only one."

"Yes, but you're a quack lady doctor."

"Are you implying I'm a girl?"

"No, I'm outright stating it."

"Did you steal my anime collection again?"

"I'll never admit to that. By the way, do you realize how much of a hero complex you've developed? It would put Kawakami Gensai to shame."

"You just did. And don't knock heroics. They're useful in a pinch, especially if you want to look impressive."

"Complex."

"Jungian dysfunction."

"Ego Trip."

"Mother's boy."

"Ponce."

"Sadist."

"Self-loathing twat."

"No argument there."

"…well that was no fun. You broke my run."

"Who are you, Doctor Seuss now?"

"Don't you mean Doctor Moreau?"

"No. I meant Seuss. Or Zhivago. You rhymed, too. See, you're not evil! That's something, at least! And speaking of the Rani, she never could carry a tune. Or a plan to fruition, frankly. Her modus operandi always were a bit rubbish. I really can't understand why she just couldn't pack it in. I was always going to defeat her. That was always in the cards."

"Plus the fact she was an idiot. And since when did you play Gin Roummy?"

"I know! Poor woman- she kissed like a limp fish. Anyway, to answer your question, since that unfortunate incident _In Bruges_. But ooh, limp fish, that reminds me! Did I ever tell you about that Saturnyne icthyoform who proposed to me?"

"I heard about that. Something involving an alternate micro-universe created because of that irritating crack in space-time? She and her boys got stranded, wanted to play happy families by setting up illegal terraforming equipment in Venice. Mummy hit on you. What did you say?"

"I said, 'It'll never work. I'm a Time Lord. You're a… big fish.' How did you know, by the way?"

"Charming. I take it she died soon after? My my my but you have such bad luck with anyone under five hundred. And I'm not answering that."

"Fair enough. Of course, that timeline never happens now. The cracks are gone, along with every adverse change they affected."

"… do you really think that? You still remember though. That's as adverse an effect as any. Curse of the Time Lords, blah di blah di blah. You shouldn't brood so much. Idiot. Some of the more _annoying_ people could have still stayed dead! You never know!"

"Don't be an arse. I'm saying that I've played the fool so long, the mask is all they see. Maybe it's all that's left me now. To play the fool."

"… don't be an arse. Theta, you need a vacation. Shall we go annoy someone?"

…there's no need. Someone's been right outside the door for the last quarter-hour."

"What the devil? Is that… is that Pasmodius? Oh god it is."

"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. Burn the wick at both ends, so to speak."

"No-one Knows Pasmo unless they're just as insane as he is! And how the hell do you know he isn't rattlebrained?"

" Hush. I just do. Or rather I did, a very long time ago."

"You've lost it. I'm letting him in, if only to keep you from talking. The fall obviously broke your head."

"You mean my bum, I suppose. Last time I checked, I wasn't an Auton. They aren't interchangeable."

"Well, since the old clattrap has managed to horn in, why don't we share some of the spoils?"

"You mean give that macadamias for brains librarian a share in the whole cornucopia? Do you think that's wise?"

"Didn't you just say… nevermind. I'm letting him in. Hey, what's that on your hand… that ring, it's…"

"Nothing you need concern your pretty head over. There, see? That wasn't so hard, was it?"

grumble


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve: Hell is for Handbaskets

Flashback to the day before.

The Hand curls itself around the hand with the golden ring, building up to a needy nudge. It rather likes the sound of the Other master's breathing. It rather likes the touch of the Other master's fingers… the patting and petting and talk of 'good boy, Hand!' and the speaking to Flamina in his belly. Old body, new body… it doesn't matter, because Other master is always nice. And, Flamina is inside, too. Safe inside. Safe and warm, inside. The Time Lords did not know yet, what the Other master had had to do. Only the One, and the Two, and the Three. But Three was Other master, and Other master was not talking to the Hand, being asleep. Still, it keeps nudging for a pet-pet it knew would never come because Other master was, indeed, asleep. Other master had fed the Hand crispytastysweet carrots when the Hand had been the Bird. He still did that, did Other master. And as for that, the Hand had decided a while ago that it should continue liking carrots. And always would, probably.

Other master had been tired recently, because of Flamina. Perhaps that was why he had fallen from the chair yesterday. Or had it been today? Ever since rejoining with itself, the days have been mixed up. The Hand knows this because it could have sworn it had dropped a fishing pole on One's head tomorrow. It remembers turning into a little boy and using a bit of One's damaged heart to lure the Bird to the door of the TARDIS. Rose Woman had petted the Hand, told it, 'Good boy.'

If the Hand had been that chair instead of the Hand, Other master might not be sleeping in the Infirmary now. He would still be sitting in the Hand, using the thing called a tongue between the things called teeth.

It shrinks slightly in size at the thought of not having been the chair. It would have liked to have been…

What it doesn't like is the Other-master being so vulnerable. That scares the Hand, and makes it remember the Old Days when Omega the One who had made it and its lost sibling had died, at the heart of the star called Qqaba.

But such notions, such dwellings on things out of the Hand's control are not for the Hand. The Hand has a job to do. Before Other master had fallen asleep, he 'd said the Hand should go to the Cardinal's chambers and poke about for anything that did not smell of the Cardinal. The Hand knew easily what Other master meant, but it needed a nose, in the first place.

So it changes, growing from the floor, up and up, and up, beginning the Bird again. It likes becoming the Bird. It has wings, and talons. A sharp mouth-beak for carrots.

Like a spider it scurries over and under and into itself; it crawls into its shape, growing the feathers and the cartilage and the sharp poke-y claws. The beady milk-bubble eyes that can see. The olfactory nares that can smell things, set into the outskirts of hard beak.

It hops and flops into the air, making the leap to the window. Then the Bird who was the Hand begins to lift.

Other master had got the guards to ignore the Hand, when it was the Bird; the Bird could fly and scratch and change what it wanted, not like the Hand, who got stepped on and always had to be a rug. Other master was the only person the Hand didn't mind being the Hand with, because Other master never stepped on it. Other master was careful not to.

Wings furling against its sides like flags rolling down on their poles, the Bird sails for the door, becoming a nut-shape in midflight as it coasts past the doorframe and into the hallway.

'Above their heads, between their legs…' the Other master always said. Care not to scratch anyone was important. One scratch could not chaossify any longer, but the long curlable toes with their bright talons could still bring a welt up on the unprepared.

Hanging fairly high over the head of a Time Lord in purple with a skinny neck that perhaps would have been too easily scraped, the Bird who was the Hand glides on down the hallway, bypassing room after room. When it reaches the right one, it pops into flatness with a slight cloud of feathers, becoming a keycard to fit the passkey machine next to the vestibule.

It changes again on entry, becoming the Hand itself once more so it can easily scurry along the desks and tapestries papering the rooms of the Cardinal.

Other master would have said something like, '…mmm. Looks like a bad remodel. Could be worse though! There could be mounted fish.' The Hand knows this for a fact, because Other master had preferred Borusa's decorations to the ones in the Cardinal's quarters now, and had said the words the Hand remembered, the very phrase.

It hovers mid-leap to survey its immediate surroundings, which consist of a dark desk, a familiar set of drawers, and a pair of bookshelves; one shelf was high, another low. Nothing at first glance. The chest in the corner was a heavyset Bombay- those curving drawers would need pulling. So it vibrates them out softly, checking each one for anything the Other-master has described, absently but fervently wishing that Other-master will allow it to fix the beloved Sonic so it can –do wood-.

And there is a lot of wood to do; what is it with the Time Lords and Bombay chests? There is one in almost every room, for some reason…

It commands a drawer to pull itself out, remembering how the Other-master ( and really the Hand should call him Doctor more often, but, old habits and such…) had likened it to something called a broom in… what was it now… _Fantasia_? Well, whatever that was.

"Hrmm. Delicate documents stuffed in an underwear drawer-…" the Hand can just hear the Other-ma- er, Doctor smirking at his own joke, "…obviously a closeted napper of nappies, a collector of underthings and smallclothes- and maybe toiletries, judging by his erm, extensive medicine cabinet. At first glance, a looky-loo. Then again, could be a dwarf enthusiast or a pickpocket. Or a pervert, in the right situation. But let us not go there. On to the next stick of furniture!"

Oh yes, the Doctor could go on and on for years like that, gabbling away.

Sometimes though, the Hand postulates on the other glove, and grows sad.

_How exactly does an object become melancholy?_ it muses as it rifles and sifts through pairs of chartreuse lace stockings, cream and black-striped gaudy French dresses and endless boring pantaloons for more documents. It has already found the, what was it called? Shopping List, hidden in a perception-filtered hat box.

The Doctor's voice floats up again, into the Hand's thoughts. Abruptly, it imagines them coursing through its constructed bare bit of wrist somewhere. "Now Handy, there's my Extra-Special Extra-Handy-Hand! Where do you think you should look next? Surely you've had enough of crossdressing and corsets and would like some nice after dinner material, eh? I think it's time to write a letter… but remember to put the isometric locks back where you dissolved them! We don't want the nice assassin to discover we've been admiring his fancy colours…"

Of course! The desk. The Hand had forgotten the desk until the clawfoot leg had smacked it in the finger. It would surely scowl, had it a mouth. Or a face. The noble furniture of the Citadel were not as haughty as the House furniture, but they still could give one quite a bit of lip. The desk, however, keeps silent under the Hand's eyeless gaze, because it knows the Hand could deconstruct it into its individual atoms.

Not that the Doctor would have let it. The desk isn't that bad, anyhow, not like the man who had placed it in this room. The Assassin.

With the upstart suitably chastised, the Hand sends the single sense it possesses in hand-form upward, its complex scan beams travelling the matter of the leg itself until it reaches a queer false bottom near the wooden well. There is a hidden notch, practically in plain sight from the Hand's quite low perspective, but perfectly disguised by the standards of those with legs, cleverly concealed under the belly of the desk in a nondescript whorl of burl. It launches itself again, growing a pseudopod in mid-bounce- just in time to fill the notch like a key made of jelly, effecting a nice tidy clicking sound from somewhere.

The Hand drops down, becoming a bird once more so it can cover more ground as it looks for the end source of the click.

Here? No. Not the bookshelves.

It scurries across the room to the table.

No, not the table.

A slight wind blows from the corner- there is only a tapestry there. Strange how it can't access the memory files on how the Assassin came to be inhabiting this room… perhaps it is a duplicate. Yes. It cannot be the same one that…

The Bird who is the Hand gambols over to investigate on thin legs, spreading its sharp toes wide as it walks. Reaching the corner, it sticks its beak behind the tapestry, suppressing a squawk of excitation in the interests of prudence.

The Assassin had found the Doctor's old room from his days as Lord President, and had ordered it sealed, him having pretended to be the Cardinal and all for the past few months. The Doctor would have thought it odd that they'd never found the short stone passage behind that old tapestry, which the Bird-Hand now found itself traversing. Must have been a perception filter on it the size of Mount Perdition. Perhaps the Doctor had left it that way? Well, after the Hand was done, it would snap its fingers and put everything back as it had found it, shelves neat, drawers in, drawers in the drawers instead of on the rug, petticoats in the chest. But it would confiscate the contents of the lonely trunk sitting in the middle of the Doctor's old room, thanks.

After all, hadn't the Doctor always said, "What is it with villains? They never put their stuff away after they move in. It's a fair bit embarrassing, not to mention fodder for the neighbors..."

It never sees the hand come down around it. Never sees the silver ring shoved down its throat.

It disappears.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen: What Goes Around, Comes Around

Pasmo turns to a monitor. It displays the current day, then speeds through a Dromiean's diatribe about the weather for the next twelve years. Something about temporal die off in Mutter's Spiral…

"Well old man, those damn rings make me feel drugged. But, let me get this right. You're saying she's… … growing- in there?" Dressed in only a long nightshirt and a black hoodie, the Master sticks a finger in the Doctor's general direction.

Following his Lord President's finger as it pokes at the unconscious Time Lord on the medical bed, Pasmo raises his shoulders. Absently the Master wonders if he's attempting a shrug, but then the old man opens his mouth, trying rather messily for speech around a mouthful of fish, "I think that'sh exactwy what he did. There musht have been no ovver way. When Nemontiarwa came to me and towd me, I immeeditwy cawwed the guardth." swallow "Ah, these are lovely this time of year. Regardless, the group I had sent out to look for him found a trail of bare footprints leading all the way to the Pythia's Tower. He was like this when they reached him. You, on the other hand," Pasmo takes another raw bite, from the belly this time, "- they found thpawwed on the fwoor of the TAwDIS. Boff of yoo were weawing these odd gowd wings." swallow

The old man holds up the golden rings in a claw-like hand. They fall from his fingers like sunbeams, dangling on two separate chains in his grip. "Do you know, we think these are the same rings stolen from the Museum when the Eighth Doctor was here during the War. They allow you to experience your own timeline through presets in such a way that you don't have to experience it twice. Clever little things. Rumour has it they were made for the Last Pythia and her Consort just before the beginning of the Rassilon Era by one of the Triumvirate. Oh, and I took the opportunity to place guards loyal to me outside the door. This room is ours. Say what you want."

The Master reaches over the Doctor's prostrate form to knock a fist into the platter with the fish on, sending a bit of fluffy greens and little red fruit soaring away into a corner. The fish, however, he catches in his mouth like a diving bird, and takes a bite the size of Space Kansas. The big half-eaten Pnyy bass wobbles in his teeth, but stays put. _His_ teeth are all there, thank you so much! Through the fish, he adds, "If I hafe to wats youw gweathy wittwe buffard of a twoat gargwe thuthi one mowe time, I am goeen to sthoot mythewf."

Pasmodius' cracked and withered lips part again, rising and reaching and growing and flowing, filling the room, a toothless black omen in a paper bag. And then old Pasmo, crazy old Pasmo, touches the ring on his finger, dissolving the effects of the shimmer around his strong, ancient body. Deeply, richly, cavernously, in an old-young voice like veins of untapped ore, he speaks. He says, "Does this throat work better for you, you Presumptious Prancing Pestilence?" Purple robes fly in a funnel across the unoccupied bed and clamp down on the Master's neck, and the cold iron grip of a far stronger man than Pasmodius of the House of Patrex closes tightly around a throat.

The Pnyy drops.


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen: The Hand of Fatima

"Really, Dallyrasse? Kill them? Is that what Tzipporahkoczeskatilya would want?"

Both men turn; a voice that cannot be flies out of the dark of a storage cupboard. A figure in a dark hood appears to own the sounds. He is dressed in black from hood brim to boot strap. Those boots cross the room now, with so convincing a lack of swagger that the two conscious men in the room could easily believe he isn't there at all. The man pauses to look at something on his wrist, then leans on a monitor halfway between the Doctor's bed and the Master, whose feet are dangling and twitching like a bag of live snakes in the general vicinity of 'Pasmo's' medal.

"Stop squirming, vermin! I swore I'd kill the both of you. What makes you think I care how many of you there are? I failed my daughter. Failed Gallifrey. Because of you! It's all gone... her beautiful future, my reasons for existence… everything lost to you, and him, and that fool who wears my face." His fingers tear holes in him; red lines trickle down across his cheeks, exposing the top layer of skin to the open air in thin rents.

But then his eyes lift, as if born up. His lashes raise like the veil of a virgin, his gaze railing against it all, the tiny flame of a candle lit by newly soaked wick.

"What? What did you say? My daughter's… name?" he screams, a lurching pool of purple silk as he lunges for the man in the cloak.

"Answer the Question, Dallyrasse," the man in the cloak singsongs, dancing away from that big, formidable, grasping male hand with all the stolen grace of the daughter Rassilon had named so long ago, as he'd gazed out over fields full of ash and dreamed. "Would Tzipporahkoczeskatilya have wanted to see you like this?" Then he edges closer, just out of reach of those fingers grasping for him like descending lightning, and Rassilon goes for black cloak's throat, too.

The fingers float in the air, curving out into the empty space between them. Deeper in and running through endless fields of charcoal and pitch and starry sky, Rassilon squirms his hands through the darkness, searching for flesh beneath so he can wrest his daughter's name from the cloaked man's barbed and seething lips.

But the blackness is like branches in the night, the branches more spine than limb. They claw at him, tearing and ripping and shredding his clothes until he is naked- he falls on the ground before them and they shudder, dropping their small, juiceful blackish fruit upon his face. He closes his eyes, and his nose is filled with the rainy scent of the fleshy black fruits. More and more of the fruit, as they ripen and fall down, cover his eyes like a shroud, and he weeps as his vision is obscured like a window being closed, by the glossy black hips of grey roses, full and subtle and thick with the perfume of ash. They pile and pool and press upon him, and he trembles beneath their weight at last, and is still.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen: a Last Late Chrysanthemum

He looks on his lover's ceiling with eyes acquainted to brimming, because he is alone. The man he spends his nights with is long absent, away on a mission of mercy. After all, they shoot fishpigs, don't they? And the blue and green slashes of color laboring across the door do nothing to assuage him. He does not care for water anymore, nor does he care for life. His body is draped in the sheets like a present unwrapped from a swaddle of silk, his limbs sprawled and heavy. He is thick with it. He's been hit by a vehicle. It's the way he feels, anyway.

And these gifts of his, they were never really coveted. Just borrowed.

As he lies there, on his beloved's bed, he looks again to the colors on the door, the blue and green slashes, the circuit-like pattern in abstract lines running perpendicular to nature, a vent in mid-air, slapped like meat on the line of a meadow where it doesn't belong. Like his makeup. His lover's promises.

He is alone. He fingers the silver knife he keeps, with its long snaking blade and its black and white hilt. He remembers when his lover gave it. There had been no hint of a kiss, only a tentative locking of lips in the dark. They had exchanged things, since then. Wine glasses, body juices. Nights. Oh yes, every night since.

No love.

No love.

With a sigh, he fingers the long wave of metal until his fingers prick on the point. A line of blood pops on his palm, and he allows it to drip, to have the run of the place as he presses the knife's tip further into the epidermis.

No love.

He is, as the humans would say, Prometheus in the shade of the rock, waiting. Gallifrey's version is infinitely more accurate. After all, it was a sun that was stolen, and not by Prometheus. All of them are guilty, really.

The room is so still, with him gone. Needing new decoration, because the previous arrangement does not suit that man at all. He never even took off his ring for him. That damn silver band.

Oh well.

The decorative sheath at the back of his head clicks as he slides the comb-knife back into place. It hangs below his cerulean locks, so the skull cap of his official robes won't pester it. Won't allude. His eyes ache; they burn. They sting. Tears are running lines in his mascara.

If he loses, then he will finish the Job. For his lover.

It's best left unrequited. And as for the Doctor, he will do for him. For that man, a last thrust in the dark. Oh yes. It will be redness and the little death for the Doctor tomorrow.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen: Midnight at the Frog and Crane

So you're River Song. Good gods there's two of you." says the Master as he sticks his fingers under the Doctor's shirt to lift it, looks, pats the slightly pointed bit of belly-bump, then turns back to the woman in black. "Did he make like a yeast and divide? Again?"

River Song smiles as a hand snakes over her hip and grips her bottom. "Mmm. Hello Sweetie. Are we back where we belong?"

The Doctor, laid out on the bed under a sheet, is not asleep. He opens his green eyes like stealthy windows on the day, and his lips quirk by themselves into a right-sided line. "Oh I don't know, Missus Robinson… it's rather like choosing a good orange. They've got to have good color, and firmness. And plumpness!" He swallows, looking wistful. His eyebrows raise in appreciation. "And all the right curves, too. I'm a lucky boy, to be such a good judge of erm… exotic fruits."

The Master snorts, through his hand, because it's covering his face now. "You _are _an exotic fruit, dipthong-for-brains."

River Song smiles and slides one finger along the hem of the black silk cloak, swishing the material about. "Oh! You think I'm exotic. The Master's exactly right. You, my love, are a thing to be praised. What exactly did we just do to that poor man, to make him freeze like that?" Her eyes flutter over Rassilon's still form.

The Doctor, in his infinite wisdom, sits up easily, furrows his brow and studies Rassilon with the intent of a hungry male walrus, then decides to say something… relatively notable. "Nothing a sense of humour won't fix. He's just cross because he thinks I stole his Christmas present to himself a while back." He pokes at Rassilon's free hand, the other still being around the Master's neck, and smiles, lifting it up and waving the fingers at River, then the Master. "Rassilon, this is my wife, River Song. Master, this is my wife River Song. River, this is Rassilon, and that's the Master! Say hello, Master! Say hello, Rassilon!"

River Song exhales a heavy breath and adjusts her seat on the Doctor's bed. She shoots a glance at the Master, then turns back to the Doctor, saying only, "Now Sweetie, you know that'll never catch on at parties. And are you sure you're quite all right and sorted after borrowing my body to play your little trick? That was quite a new experience, you using my mouth like that. Anyway, he must be in shock. I think it's a good look for him."

"Well yes, but which one? An yes I'm quite sure I'm fine…" the Doctor smirks. He checks Rassilon's neck and wrists, then the Master's… wrists, for obvious reasons. "You know, _Dear_, I think you've got something there." Wrapping his arm around River's waist, he pulls her against him, pressing long squarish fingers to her stomach. "And may I say, you look ravishing in that Flesh avatar, rather like a bar of dark chocolate with legs."

"Oh yes, _very_ fine…" says River, eyeing his bum, and with both eyes, too! "But I don't know what to call you. Perhaps a caramel? Or a nougat… no, no- my Benjamin's definitely a jelly baby."

"Oy, you bad, bad girl!" The Doctor's lips spread wide, despite himself. He scrubs at a spot on his tweed.

Eyes bulging with the desperation to escape, for various reasons, the Master leans as far as he can with Rassilon's hand still clutching him by the throat. He manages a half-metre in the general direction of the door, before gagging. "Yes, yes! He's a jelly baby and you're a chocolate bar! This isn't a sweets shoppe and I'm not Sinter Klaus and I want to see what she's wearing under that cloak, blast you! 'Cause after _this_ day, _one_ of you had _better _be wearing a corset!"

River says, "That would be me, Master. See?" She parts the folds of the black silk robe, revealing a black velvet corset. "Mine's a pregnancy corset. And the best part is, these don't make pâté out of your organs, because they're bigger on the inside." She smiles at the Doctor. "That was really an ingenious idea, making transdimensional corsets. Quite comfy, too."

The Doctor's hand cups his sharpish bump as he blushes and giggles. Then River cups it, and he giggles some more. "Sorry Koschei… that was only my fifth body, thanks. No repeats." Somehow, he's wiggled and squirreled and wriggled himself until he's sprawled half out of River's lap. "Besides, it's not my fault you just like to look."

River pets his cheek and grins.

A groan emits from the the Master's half-strangled throat. "Do not. Do that. In front of me. I'll barf. But back to the point. I missed _that_? _I bloody missed _**that**_?_" Sensing a continuation of the spectacle, he sticks a finger as far down his throat as he can manage, then makes a gagging noise…

glack!

glurg!

gluck!

"Good imitation of a person gagging, Koschei! I give you a gold star for mathematical excellence!" the Doctor says, grinning wiping a tear from his face as he remembers he's forgotten he's not supposed to say that anymore. He then gets up from River's triangled legs, plants a wet kiss on her springy gold curls, burrowing in like a star-nosed mole, then uncrooks a finger to the door. "We ought to be going- we'll be late." He turns to the Master, saying, "Hang in there, Koschei! I'm out to an early lunch- and my wife is coming, too!"

"No, no, you promised you'd get me out of this!" the Master whinges, shoving a finger at Rassilon and sticking him in the eye. Repeatedly.

But the Doctor and River are already heading out the door.

"At least tell me the name of that corset shop!"

Outside the Infirmary door, the Doctor lingers between the two guards, tossing a ready smile back and forth as the occasion presents. River has gone ahead to the TARDIS to dress for their outing. She has the wrist-strap, after all. Who is he to take away his wife's little leather toy? He doesn't really like them, anyway. Who needs a unicycle when you've got a big blue Rolls?

As he wanders down the hallway, taking the long route back to the TARDIS so he can get a bit of thinking time, he notices a shadow in long, swishing robes, moving toward the Infirmary.

"Oh, Rassilon, hello! Where do you think you're going?"


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen: Gymnopédie II

"I may have mentioned the design to a prominent tailor, but I honestly don't see how you can stand to wear that thing, even if it is extremely comfortable… and sexist."

River Song takes the Doctor's hand in hers and pats his knuckles gently. "You'd think you were pregnant, the way you carry on, my love." Her fingers lace in his as they walk down the blue-grey path to the square of purple park grass.

His fingers clench suddenly away from her, and he's bending, his hand a tight claw against his stomach.

Vision, for the Doctor, becomes a narrow focus, a single pinpoint of brightness at the end of a dark, square tunnel. Billions of tunnels. He's in a maze, running. And suddenly the maze is full of light.

River helps him to one of the benches, the nearest one. It has a stone drink holder on the side.

"My god, Theta- are you all right?" Now her fingers brush his face, but he's not listening. His forehead is hot, and her own hand is on her stomach now, checking for temperature differences she might have missed.

"Not you, Melody," he manages, gagging against what he knows is coming. He hates himself for it. "It's a friend of mine. Please go and get us a nice basket of fried Pnyy and veg chips, the ones… with the…" He grabs her hand, squeezing a little too tightly; she feels a joint pop. "Sorry, my love… you can't meet this one yet. He might shoot you, because he _doesn't_ love you yet, and that won't make it very fun for me!"

She ruffles his hair. It sprawls wetly down over his forehead, and a chuckle escapes her. He looks like a drowned rabbit.

"I see the cart you're talking about; I'll go. And hide my face. I'll keep my back turned, chat up the vendor- will that be good enough, Sweetheart?"

Her hands are on his cheeks now, plastered there as if she's holding them on. And now he's shivering. One moment she is there, the next, she is turning… in a haze of filmy blue wrap and jeans, and a soft corset top of smoky burgundy so dark it's nearly black. Her hair is up, a delicious, glistening sticky bun of golden curls stuck to the back of her head. She's dripping bits of cinnamon and honey.

Absently, he hopes she's warm enough. For the baby.

But it's a sunny day.

Hot.

The light is bearing down on him.

Beads of sweat.

A drop.

It's clinging to the tip of a lock of his hair, cast between his temples like a lopsided bindi.

The round bottom of the droplet beckons, like another universe. Inside the jewel-shape, he can see Eternity.

His eyes squirm in their sockets, resetting. Adjusting. His irises squeeze atoms together till they're half a soul wide, displaying the world in miniscope. Like windows.

Disassociate now, floating awkwardly like a child learning how to swim in the same awkward moment, over and over, awkwardly, awkwardly, he attends the little droplet at the end of his forelock.

It speaks Creation's name to him with blind lips his hindbrain only vaguely remembers kissing.

A shadow falls, full of little points. Full of stars.

Then the droplet leaves him, edging along the tip of that particularly rabbit-hearted lock of his own brownish hair to cascade neatly away onto the pavers of the park walk. Inside, he's flapping and flailing in space.

"It's you."

"Yeah. Need a hand?"

The star-shadow touches him- he can feel strong fingers grip his shoulder through his crisp white shirt. Another hand loosens his tie.

"Yeah, I remember that shade of green. Peckish, with a dash of pimento. Happened a lot when I was pregnant. And I never caught your name at my stag do, handsome boy," says the shadow, rubbing circles into his back.

"I never gave it. Hello, Captain. My Captain. My wife will enjoy the story I think, but now is not the time. She's here, somewhere, getting us some tasty fish. The bass from Pnyy is delectable, this time of year."

His touch skirts across the Rose Ring on his finger, giving the golden metal an absent polish. He clicks the Rose, and things begin to feel better. He still can't quite remember stealing it, all those years ago. From the Museum.

The shadow is flesh now. His Jack. His Jack. He sighs and sits up slowly, his celery peridots taking their time in focusing on a group of Pyrovillaean kids playing on the water slide. They're cute, the way they keep betting each other who can get themselves wet first and put out the flame on their little root-vegetable heads.

"I'm feeling better, thanks. It's Benjamin, by the way. Benjamin Pond. Emily, that's my wife, must be having a good time at the chip vendor- It's nearly dark now, and there're no kids left. She's been gone thirty minutes. Course, I did ask her to chat him up… maybe get us a discount. She's quite resourceful. Can't do without her."

"She sounds quite the catch. It's a nice ring. Does she have one too?"

"She does. But this ring is part of a set. My friend has the other one, sort of a private joke."

Jack's hands curl around his shoulders, draping hard pecs against his bony spine and over the short bench. Arms encircle him, enshrouding his body in billions of stars. "It's good to have friends, Benjamin Pond. You remind me of one of mine, who died. Do you… I mean… it's just that you make me think of him so much. Can I?"

"Yes, Jack. Comfort is my business, and I'm the best moonlighter Elegant Egotist has, with the best barriers. What was his name? I'll try to accommodate."

Jack Harkness sighs, and just leans over the bench, easing his weight against Benjamin's back. Feeling the warmth.

"No name. Just the Doctor. He hates… hated it when I called him Doc. Or he pretended to."

"Very well then, Jack. And it's just between us, your special rate. So Doc it is."


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen: We Bake a Likely Lussebulle, For Saint Lucia's Day

The Doctor adjusts himself. There's a mirror in the corner, handily arranged. They've had to makeshift everything, since the clean-up started. But it's going slow.

His hands fumble at the cufflinks. They've always been rubbish, but he wears them now. He wants to shine himself up, and how better then his new usual of white and black?

The cufflinks go undone in favour of defiance and the last button on his nice crisp shirt. He thinks perhaps he's got a craving for the thing- the shirt that is, not the button. He's grown to fancy them, since taking on Flamina as a… ward.

As he reaches down to pat her where she's growing, he smiles somewhat, hovering his hand halfway between his stomach's blunted apex and the undone two-button drop front on his near-black trousers, and thinks of Paris and the Louvre.

His knuckles turn flat. He presses them to his chin, considering the Mona Lisa as he remembers her. Or him, depending on the season. Nice bloke, she was.

With the wrong hand, the hand with the Ring, absently he reaches down to touch his guest again.

Metal meets pale skin, and roots of ice penetrate hard muscle beneath the protective fat, and he bawls soundlessly with an open mouth, biting his lip as pain flays open nerves rendered temporally raw by her presence inside him.

"Wrong… hand… idiot," he grits through grinding teeth. Vibrations rattle his personal timestream, past, present, future, and the ring whisks him away, into a swirling storm. "…so much for the failsafe."

He is walking down the hall, away from the Infirmary.

His eyes catch on a glimpse of shadow trailing red robes. This blur of red, it's coming toward him.

"Oh, Rassilon, hello! Where do you think you're going?" he hears himself say.

His eyesight must be going- he's seeing in squares! The other man's smirk, the greyish walls, the retro-modern plastic-looking dog food scoop of a chair beside a door- it all becomes a mess of scattered tessera, a pool of tiny glass tiles cast for divining.

Lines of temporal force are converging, the tails of black lines lighting the darkness before the powder keg. He must follow them. He must. So he does.

While walking backward, he shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the mosaic, and trips over another chair, a brown one. Funny, he doesn't remember Giovannetti ever consulting on the Brady Bunch...

He reaches the door before the Assassin does, putting the guards to sleep with a word and a tap to the shoulder. No casualties are what he's aiming for, but he can't control everything. He isn't everywhere at once. Save Rassilon. Save the Master. Save…

"You all right in here, Koschei? I'm out to (a bit of) lunch!" he murmurs, elbowing the Master and affecting a knowing look he's stolen from the late Lord Robin, consisting of raised eyebrows and a general air of loveable cluelessness. Well, someone stole it from someone, anyway.

"I'll say. Weren't you just in here? Are you using that damn ring again? I'm not keen on staying in here with Him." The Master points to Rassilon, then brings his hand up, mimicking a hanging rope. "Did I mention I hate you? Get me out of here."

"Oh, no you don't! But first things' first, Koschei. You only have one wish left. What's it going to be?"

"Honestly, I'd have to go with GET HIS HAND OFF MY THROAT YOU BLOODY WANKER. It's the obvious one, but I'm at your discretion."

Whipping his favorite fizzy straw from somewhere and stuffing it in his mouth, the Doctor holds the Master's chin on his fingertips, then raises one palm above and taps the man's head as if taking measurements for a fitting. "Can you stop moving please? I'm trying to gauge the correct size."

"What?"

"Of your coffin, silly! You'll be dead soon. Just thought you should know. Bye!"says the Doctor, sucking idly on the straw. He holds it up. You're just mad 'cause you didn't get a fizzy straw." His eyes dart to the door of the Infirmary, then back to Rassilon and the Master. Obviously he's been a gold member of the straight face brigade longer than either one of them. Obviously.

"I never thought I'd say this, but you're more insane than I am. At least I have my limits…" The Master trails off when he sees what's on the chain the Doctor is pulling from his pocket. "What are you… doing? Are you hormonal?"

Grabbing the Master's cheek and giving it a good pudgy pinch, the Doctor adds, "Now don't be flip. Tell me nicely. What do you want, little boy?"

"You're an idiot. I want OUT OF THIS ROOM! And I'm older than you."

"Ah, you should have said that to begin with!" Placing the chain around the Master's neck, the Doctor skirts a glance once more toward the exit of the Infirmary, then holds the ring up to the Master's face. "Be nice. I'm trying to save your life. Geronimo!" Then he presses the rose...

The Master groans, because flailing will do no good with an obviously affected person. "Oh no, you _shit_! _You shit_! Angels and Ministers of Grace preserve-"

There is that signature bamf! sound; the Master disappears.

"Have a good time wherever it takes you, Kos," the Doctor breathes as he turns to straighten Rassilon's purple robes on his shoulders. "Now _you_ have been a _very_ naughty boy haven't you, Dallyrasse? I wish I could stay and help you, but I can't. I have to protect her from him. Which means you'll have to improvise. Just know this- that man, your former pet, is coming to give us our medication, so you'd better snap out of it or I will be very cross. Now wakey-wakey!" He flattens his palm and smacks Rassilon twice, once for each cheek. "Think of Tzipporahkozceskatilya, of Cossie, your wife. And remember to breathe, there's a good bloke!"

Rassilon whispers something, but the Doctor clicks the Rose on his own ring, and goes.

He lands back where he should be, in his half-robed body, in the disrobing room, where he always was, now. Was he on the ceiling, before? He can't recall. All he knows is that his hands are cold. He holds them against himself, careful not to touch Flamina where she's sleeping just below his navel. She'll kick him for certain. His bench is still beneath him, still solid. He molds his fingers to the edge of the little dressing seat and struggles for air. A knot is building in his throat, like the crunch of leaves when dark intentions follow a child into the woods. He berates himself, swallowing something back down where it belongs. "You ought to be glad you only want to sick up, after screwing around with the chronologic presets like that. Even if it _was_ an accident, it was stupid of you, because of Flamina." His fingers drift afloat over his stomach again, loathe to touch because they're like icicles dangling from his palms. "Stupid, stupid Time Lord. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, st-?"

"Nonsense. You're not a boy anymore."

A hand lands like a feather on one shoulder blade. He stiffens, his motions at once thick with the abrupt grace of a crane alerting to something in the water.

"Who…?"

The small voice and hand, as it turns out, belong to a small face, judging by the size of the hand.

The Doctor looks up.

A seven year old blonde girl in a white gown is standing on the step next to the bench, her delicate fingers pressed against his back, her young shoulders drenched in a bright velvet cloak of Prydon red.

"Hello, Theta. You've been absent far too long. There are many among us who may have missed your meddling. I of course, was not one of them. As for the Ring, I know better than to ask what you're about. And, as for that greensih tinge to your face, if you're too ill to give evidence today, you will still have to do it eventually." Her voice is direct, crystalline and surprisingly powerful, for a child. Of course, this is no child.

"Oh my-! I can't… Borusa? My old master of studies, former Cardinal Borusa? Oh my word. That's just… that's just… Oh I'm so sorry sir, but… this is… oh, this is too much! Saint Lucia on a step stool! Ah hah ha ha ha HAH HAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Suitably chastised, the Doctor slides down to the ground onto his back, still laughing as girl-child-Borusa glares down at him with moist, slightly pouting lips.

She gestures to the Doctor's stomach. "Ah- I see. That's where you put her. I was suspicious when her tracer vanished off the screens near the Eye of Exit. "

The Doctor stares, his eyelids shoving down like a dog's tail as he struggles to regain himself. He snorts his way into one last obstinate grin, then, out of air from laughing, lies back on the stones of the floor and rests himself, his teeth groaning apart in gaping draws of breath, his four lungs heaving like he's just run away from something substantially larger than he.

Borusa, recalling her genius student as dubious at best, settles herself on the step and waits for him to remember the courtesies. "You are the most chaotic, devious, destructive, most irritating and insufferably noble creature in the history of Gallifrey, my boy. Give me your wrist."

"I'm okay, really, just let me…Ow-ow-ow!" The Doctor writhes on the ground, his arms wrapped around his belly, face scrunched in a school boy wince. "Oh, blimey. I laughed too hard. " koff-koff "Hey listen, would you help me u- oh right. You can't; you're a midg- I mean a minor...erm… substantively diminutive person…" He rolls onto his side and looks up in time to see Borusa plant her kiddy foot on his forehead.

Three merits for that honest albeit feeble attempt at curtailing your rudeness."

"Thanks, miss." murmurs the Doctor, ducking away.

"Oh lord. Get up, insolent boy. We're already half an hour late for The Testimony! And you call yourself a Time Lord!" she deadpans, her voice hotly clipped, manicured and flat enough to fry several strips (and really, whole slabs would be more appropriate) of bacon.

He sighs, scratches his middle and straightens himself, finally, holding the wall and the bench to avoid any silly incidents.

"Do you mind turning 'round so I can slip my robe on, sir?"

"I'm fairly certain I'm older than you are, Doctor." says Borusa, her blue chalcedony eyes twinkling with sharp intelligence as they narrow at him. Across flushed apple cheeks, a brief smile dances on one end of a dainty mole. Still, her hands go up to cover her eyes, almost like the shamed ones, and she closes her gaze to him. "And two, you're clothed already. Be quick; just don't hurt yourself."

He sighs again, remembering his mother, and bends to get his robe, a length of red Prydon importance dangerously close to sliding off onto the floor. He grabs it up, but stands too fast and has to flop down on the bench... knocking his former teacher over into a pile of dust in the corner between the door and the seat leg.

"Oh, dear, I'm so sorry. Are you all right, Borusa? Here, let me…"

The Doctor twists to pick her up, wrapping strong hands around her small body and planting her gently on the bench seat alongside him. Her crystal blue gaze widens as his fingers palpate her scalp and chest for any bruising, but she doesn't speak until he stops to take another breath. Then she reaches up and cups his cheek.

"Stop fussing and tell me the truth, my boy. What are you up to? You've hardly spared me the indecency of this bucket on my head and as such I expect expedience from you…obedience would be too much to ask, no matter how old you are."

"Yes, mam." the Doctor murmurs, leaning on the wall as he carefully sticks one arm into his robe with out raising it all the way. "This from a Prydonian with a pail on his head. Sorry- her head. Gods I uh, can't think straight… stupid erm, hormones."

Borusa, her gaze turning steely in her stern little face, stands up and snaps her fingers, sending the dust back where it came from with a handy little trick. "Rubbish. As Time Lords we have superior control over our body systems. It's that ring of yours. Well, you'll tell me when you're ready, and preferably before you're dead. But you won't be dying, will you? Not in your… state. In any case, never believe I think less of you now than I did when I first realised what type of man you really were. If you don't feel up to this, it _can_ be postponed. You still look a bit like one of those pallid cress sandwiches Pasmo so favours."

Forcing a smile after having his bluff called, the Doctor pulls his robe the rest of the way on, hoping vainly that Borusa won't notice the tightness of his mouth as he raises his right arm a bit too high. "Oh that's just lovely… the gestational blood pressure spikes are starting up again. But really, we're okay. Come on," he adds, taking Borusa by the arm and swinging her to her feet and out the door along with him, "… let's discuss the active pieces in code on the way to the Panopticon. It'll annoy Rassilon- both of them. And speaking of Pasmo… wasn't he your man in Havana?"

"Havana?"

"Yes, _Man in Havana_! Haven't you ever seen that? It's got Sir Alec Guinness!"


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen: Messaline Dream

The Master's hand opens on a bunch of soft grey.

He remembers to open his eyes, but his eyelids lift on a strange landscape of headless, legless women set on poles all around.

There are clear white windows like sheets of spun sugar, everywhere he sees. Everywhere he looks.

His fingers traverse the grey. He lingers, sensing that his presence has been in another place but recently. There is a golden ring on his other hand, the one not touching grey.

He blinks, staring up, on his back, at a pair of stick-frame breasts that wink at him, their bounds the casing of an unfinished house. They end in truncation, with nary a bum to show for it.

His eyes, less bleary now but for aetheric beam locators, that somber expression of womanhood, take flight about the room. The space is less dark and markedly less boring than he first imagined, relying instead on high ceilings like turned out steeples, the whole thing cornered, drawn and quartered by inside-buttresses carved with a thousand white equines- a mob of hooves.

The grey is crinoline, he realises, as he pulls it to his face and buries himself in her old clothes.

"But they're not old," he murmur to the empty air inside her Type 102. "She's coming back for them, if I have to deliver her myself. That idiot better keep her in one piece, or I won't…"

"Or you won't love him anymore?" says the female face randomly popping out of the white box-shaped console sticking from the floor. The face has a seam running from one eye all the way down, like a bonkers playing card turned decorator.

"Do you know, Rosette my dear…" the Master says, cupping the 102 TARDIS' proffered milky features, "You're a lovely girl, in the nude. So elegant. You remind me of that little ape church in Jolly Old… all the white and silvery, what was it called? Oh yes…" His fingers dart, minnows in a stream as they grab the sides of the console box and press something. "Now it's got to be here somewhere… 'Mina said something about… hidden treasure…"

Click.

"Ah, yes! There it is!"

Square columns raise behind each of the many mannequins; each glass pillar contains a...

He follows the line of each identical piece of cloth, noting the slimness, the curves and the boning as though admiring a murderer's work, or perhaps a fine meal. His hands are behind his back as he walks back and forth between every column; his booted feet on the glossy floor as he paces, trying to find what she meant for him to find.

Then he sees it.

There is one, in the back, in a simple place of honour. It sits slightly to the right of the others. He crosses the room, fingers twitching to touch the thing under glass.

He feels up and down the square column, the sensitive nerves in his digits trolling for a catch release.

He wants his prize.

Craves it.

Lower.

A little to the left.

A bit to the right and up, at a slight diagonal.

Some jiggery-pokery, a precise sideways motion.

The shadow of a seam is found.

There we are. Here we are, now.

A beep issues from the face on the console- the TARDIS avatar melts back into the substantive mass of herself.

When the glass slides down, the Master is besotted.

"Only _he_ could have… honestly, and to think you liked this rubbish thing! Oh well," he groans as he lifts it delicately from its mooring and holds it to his chest. There is a tag, an antique square of paper attached by a thread to the hem. "So many black bows… you get that from your mother- the bastard."

He reads the tag.

_From _

_Your mother_

_and_

_Aunty River,_

_On your birthday._

"Good grief." he says, cradling the lovely mess of ribbons and lace and lavender silk tied and formed and waiting to be worn by the proprietress of one Type 102 TT capsule currently idling in a forest of white trees. "I want to see her again. Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME?"

"…yes."

An answer, this time from the floor as it rises up into woman-form, flowing up into curves and sensuality like a stylised statue of milk.

He grabs the 102's solid-interface avatar by the shoulders, shoving the piece of finished fabric toward the ship's blank, candle wax gaze.

" My kingdom this glass slipper to be filled. Have you got anything yet?" he breathes, sinking down into cross-legs.

The interface does the same then, reaching across and touching his face as he sways back to front with Flamina's dimensionally transcendent corset in his arms.

"I have tea," says the interface, and a service melts up from the floor.


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty: Gnossienne No. 1

"I am uncertain what you mean, Doctor. But I understand. Will you take dinner with me after The Testimony? There are things about Pasmodius I wish to discuss." Borusa adds, her plump child-cheeks rushing with blood again as she struggles to keep pace with her former charge.

The Doctor stops in the middle of the hall, waiting, his longer legs crouching on the floor so he can be at equal height with his old teacher.

'Whyever did you choose that body, Borusa? It's not very tall."

The old little girl casts sudden molten sapphires up at the Doctor; her merest glance is enough to set his bowtie on fire. He reaches up to loosen his collar, flexing his fingers. _A good thing,_ he reasons with the inevitable penache of someone saved from the gallows or a gaol or a wedding or something, _that he isn't wearing his bowtie at the moment._

"Blimey, Borusa! What was that look for? And such a quotable, by gum! 'My brother is coming, with many Fremen warriors…!'" the Doctor smirks, in her voice. "That little girl was adorable. Until she got the jump on the blind seer."

He grins that grin and bends down more and sticks a hand to her hair, ruffling it. Then his red-robed arms encircle her like a ring of rose petals and raise her to his bony shoulder.

There is, strangely, none of the expected bouncing from the Doctor's younger days; instead, the ride is rather soft and smooth.

Borusa, drifting now with the sway of the hypnotist's limbs and the height of her perch, remembers long unbroken days spent a boy, wrapt in wonder before a white tree in the northern forest. He had always known it had been a TARDIS. No-one had believed him.

Funny, how she always seems to dream when the Doctor is around.

As he walks, the Doctor considers the Time Lord in his arms.

Her hair is so light; he wants to pet it again, but Jenny was never as young as this. Borusa is not Jenny. Still, his hand hovers over her little pudgy face. There is a mole on her cheek, a birthmark, they'd have called it on Earth. It looks like a little rosebud, just popping up from the paint, nice and flat, not too conspicuous.

"Hallo, the castle! The lady's a watercolor." he murmurs, giving in and brushing a hair from her face as he passes the entry guard into the Panopticon.

The dark-skinned guard's confused chocolate rabbit of a face makes him cross, and he says something.

"Well, you'd be knackered too if you were two metres tall and you had to walk a distance the Great Wall of China because someone screwed with the temporal stabilisers! You listen to me! I know a thing or three about reticular problems! And by the way, what's your name, soldier?"

The seal-haired guard's pinching face crunches like a crisp for a half-second before he straightens. ", former Lord General Lungbarrow sir. Of House Redloom."

The Doctor, for a moment, wants to hit something. For a very small, very thick moment, he imagines himself frozen in a block of fish custard… with a stick sticking out for the convenience of hands. Not the time to lash out now, it's not the time, it's not. It's not! The fingers of one hand are curling in his robes. With Borusa dangling from his right fist by a sandalled foot, still asleep, he shoves the magma down, imagining water trickling between the slats of a washboard.

Squeezing himself through the minutes, he says to the guard, "Well, just between you and me, I'm not really a Lungbarrow, Cousin. Shush now! And keep a medic handy… the place between my shoulder-blades is itching. Someone's going to poke the bear to-day." He grins, curving his lips in his usual Cheshire fashion, despite his apprehension. Then he leans in close to Silander again, saying, "The question is, which bear? And will it be the Chinese finger puzzle or the Whitechapel autopsy?"

Silander stares, unable to make sense of much after '…not really a Lungbarrow, Cousin.', his purple eyes pitching behind closed thoughts as though he's been dealt a blow. It is a happy wound, he decides, as he nods to the man before him. It is a trouble, to be sure, to sufficiently contain his reverence. But no one must see. No one must hear. That much is plain on the Doctor's face. And yet, why speak it at all?

"Sir. I don't know what you mean, Lord Doctor sir. And may I say, I rather despise your neckwear, sir."

"Carry on then, Silander! I'll just pop old Borusa to his seat and then…" but the Doctor abruptly feels a pulling, a snare, thin wires of potential space-time closing around them all in a…

Blinking, he shakes his head. His new Cousin Silander's hand is on his shoulder and Borusa is standing beside him, looking up. Watching him, and waiting. She takes his hand, grasps it firmly with far more than a seven year old's strength.

"Call a medic like he said, but have them wait outside. This is, after all, the Doctor we are speaking of. Someone is bound to be injured with him around, well-meaning menace that he is."

Silander nods, ushering them both into the Panopticon Hall. His stiff blue uniform with its silver lines down the arms and legs reminds the Doctor of Bruce Lee's famous yellow track suit. Or maybe _TRON_.

"Thank you, sir." says the Doctor as Borusa and himself enter the hall, teacher and student side by side. Well, side by calf muscle.

The Doctor's hearts are the sounds of a train, rushing in his ears. He looks around as though his gaze is a paper mask gone soggy from sitting in water, his eyes flailing in slow motion from one face to the next. He remembers that train, sitting there by the window seat, clutching his chest, his one heart thumping sadly somewhere to the left of him. He had lost the right one, lost its purpose. Just a black lump in a jar somewhere, now- still perfectly functional, but that he himself in particular didn't need it any longer. He remembers the mirror machine. Sometimes he wonders if he broke it into enough pieces. There had been good reasons among the rotten, for the Time Lords to stifle everyone else's children. There really had been. When had it gone wrong? What had that moment been like? And could he let it happen again? Could he…

Absently, as someone _(he thinks it's )_ takes his fingers and peels them from his chair then guides him out to the damned pulpit like some bloody seeing eye dog, he begins to sense Flamina's molecules mingling inside him, merging with his fluids, his pieces. Now she is flowing through his veins, through his arteries. Through his blood. He steps across the seam in the landing, crossing to the puplit itself, finally. It is a giant sharpened phallus, gleaming turquoise just like the walls. That effect has to do with the light of Gallifrey's two suns as it hits the inside of the Panopticon. There is a shadow, of course, from the Pod in the ceiling; it casts over everything, like the Roc's egg in Arabian Nights.

Someone's hand is on his robe, tugging, desperate. A woman's hand. Or _woman-ly_, at least. The shades cast on the floor in unsteady patterns of palm fronds remind him unsettlingly of something. He looks around, trying and failing to yank himself backward and out of the strange sensation of floating through time-space. He remembers when he held Amy's hand as she floated outside the TARDIS doors, safe within the field.

Though he feels like a stone, he makes his numb lips move in tandem with the words of his speech.

"… So, you all know me, right? And you know what I generally tend to do in these… these situations. Run away. That's right. I'm a runner. But today I'm here to answer your questions. Who wants… who wants to go first?"

Murmurs like tidal pool ripples wash through the gathered.

"Is he all right?"

False humility.

"I think he's gone senile."

Greed.

"Just wait; he usually provides a show. He's probably faking... whatever it is."

Envy.

"Maybe he's contracted an alien disease!"

Paranoia.

"I wouldn't be surprised. They say he sleeps with humans."

Prejudice.

"I wouldn't let anyone of House Redloom hear you say that, Polluxina."

Hypocrisy.

"Chen 7! Oh god we're all going to die!" The owner of this comment grabs up someone else's robe to cover her mouth.

Parody.

"I'm not amused." the Doctor says suddenly, lowering the cadence of his voice until it is soft. His face is calm. His eyes drink the world and glisten like a new and mewling fawn. Then he opens his mouth again, and shatters it. "Does anyone care that we are in the middle of a crisis? I won't have it. I will leave and let you rot if this continues. And then you'll never know." He dusts off his chest area and cups his fingers at Borusa's ear, "I think it's time for me to go. I was a fool to stay here, hoping. You and any others you trust are free to come with. I don't care any-"

A gleam in the light, amongst all the other gleams. But this one is different.

Long, thin bones and long thin fingers itch for the touch of silver kept in the hair. A black comb falls from ocean strands and clicks on the floor. High above, the suns of Gallifrey cower behind the Pod in the ceiling, afraid.

Shade strikes across the metal, stones and crystal of the Panopticon, the ticking finger of a sundial.

"Falling!" screams the Doctor, pushing aside Borusa's questioning hand and knocking her to the ground. He spins, his dancing hands outflung and wild, his body the twirling figure of a dervish swathed in red and twisting like a whore at the cups around the narrow pulpit platform, as thousands of eyes focus on the places below. "Do you not see? He is dead! Dead!" His green eyes like arrows fly to the only other movement in the great room. He looks up, searching without having to search, playing cat- until high on the other side of the great six-sided hall, Pasmodius flares up from his seat, a swirl of purple and glare.

A sound comes over the comm. The Cardinal's voice, deep and distant, raging beneath like the flute of Hamelin.

"_May Qqaba's unhappy spirit consume you all! I am leaving this rotting hell, and you can all __**die**__!"_

A figure rises from his place and flows across the dais. Two feet carry their owner toward the circle set into the edge leading out to the pulpit. But because the suns are eclipsed by the Pod, no-one among them can see.

The crowds ripple with gasps, an inland sea lapping at the feet of Providence' corpse.

Borusa reaches again for the Doctor, as a wind climbs upward. Faces lean over and look, hoping to pierce the dark.

Kenny, in his veil of fishnet, reaches out for the little blonde's throat with his silver dagger, seeking an ineffectual life for an ineffectual life.

But the Doctor is staring at him. Those eyes- they change one moment to the next. In thespace of a second, they go from drilling an endless beryl bore to carving out a boundless void of spring, to thegleam of a chalice running over with vitality.

"I'm going to kill you twice for him, Thete," Kenny moans softly, wilting down. He hardens his grip on the knife, taking a step, his flapper shoulders framing the blank face of a doll. Mascara is running down his cheeks in black lines, like failure. "…first Borusa, your confidant. Then you."

The Doctor pulls him close, taking him by the arm with the knife, fingers digging into thin wrist.

"He never loved you, Kenny. Why do this to yourself?"

Kenny throws his face to the droplets falling down now from the clouds near the ceiling. His blue hair begins to puddle over his head, plastering him over.

"Okay," the Doctor says, one eye reflecting back to him from the blade in Kenny's hand. He steps in front of Borusa, whose head is bleeding from her fall. His hands splay wide away from him, inviting. Then he holds his stomach, cupping the hard bump there, removes his hand again, and smiles with such warmth, like a kind of mother. "Just one thing though- do try to miss Flamina. She's only a baby."

For a moment, Kenny can almost feel the gentle heat of sunlight, so much sunlight, in that smile. Like the embrace –he- never gave him. How like Theta to do something like that for an enemy.

Kenny ascends the pulpit with a mirror of the Doctor's smile on his face. At least someone will be happy to-day. God knows it won't be him. He will miss their conversations.

"Of course." he breathes, bowing his head to Borusa before taking that final step.

Above as below, bodies like cattle in jewel-tone silk flood the exits, jamming up in piles when they get there, for they have discovered the exits are barred. And there is nothing Silander can do as he watches from his post, the door to the Disrobing Room, but cling as men and women start to lean toward the Eye of Harmony's gravity well.

As for the Doctor, the knife punches swiftly through the front of his robe, piercing a kidney. He stumbles into Kenny, clutching his side as they both duck beneath the flight of a doomed chair.

Vermillion flows.

A roaring commences in the deep; sunlight runs into the pit, bleeding rivers of paint. Kenny tries to slip the heavy robe from the Doctor's body; he can see his friend is labouring under its weight. The breaths come faster.

Borusa helps him lay the Doctor on the floor of the pulpit. The robe slides away, a red dragon swilling into the void.

Kenny moves to stand between the two huddled figures and the wakened Eye of Harmony, his long, delicate hands outstretched against dead Qqaba's writhing, swirling appetite.

But he cannot maintain it. He falls.

The Doctor screams and, scrubbing tears from his face so hard he bleeds, tries to get up, shoving Borusa to the ground again, behind one of the fluted emerald pillars.

His tired eyes are a haze of vaseline as he stumbles to the edge of the pulpit-precipice. Flamina's dna inside him… can he use it? Can he? Does he dare?

Before he plunges himself over the side, he screams one word, just one.

A name.

"DALLYRASSE!"


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One: Bird in the Hand

_Flashback._

The Hand blinks into life in a wide space, a stained glass full of emerald and turquoise lit by the mid-day suns.

It is flying, still the Bird as it hurtles through the air, towards the inside clouds.

Wind rushes past it as it flies. Its feathers float in motion capture, to and fro and back and forth and free as it rises, past beryl rafters and azure arches, through rings and rings and rings of crystal and stone.

It turns its head down from the heavens for a moment, to look, and then!

CLANG!

A dent. Its bird-throat feels cold.

Then, a flash of light from a roc's egg.

The Doctor would have said it _this_ way:

Suddenly, Time is a whole wheat waffle in the toaster, waiting for syrup and golden spread. And Space is in the pan, frying in folds like an omelette.

"Breakfast is ready, mister bird." a little girl's voice calls.

When the bird opens its eyes at last, it is snuggled against a small chest, looking into lavendar eyes.

In one hand, there is a ladle.

Fish stew wafts up, all sweet red crabs and mild yellow fish and slimy grey oysters and chewy white clams. And squid, sucker-tipped tasty water-sugared pinkish squid. And big plump prawns with green tails.

Her white hair smells of the salt of the sea.

The Hand nuzzles her neck with its head, puffing up its pale feathers and huffing in relief as the grit of the day crusts in its pearl eyes. They well up and flow, carrying lines of crunching black dirt down its beak, lines which quickly dry in the sunlight.

This is Home.


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two: Michelangelo's The Creation of Kenny

The Doctor crumples at the edge of the pulpit, his right hand straining down to reach. He is holding Kenny by pure thought, but he will tire eventually.

His left thumb is clicking the bud on the Rose Ring back and forth. Back and forth. So frantically.

A scream rakes his throat again. His sinew rebels, the stria beginning to pluck away inside him like fiddle string from the largest point closest to the Eye; his stomach. Inside his head, he tears his senses away from it and reaches down and strains again. Jewels of cold sweat mingle with the blood from the wound in his side, making little opal droplets that pull away even as they freeze, because the gravity well of lost Qqaba is ripping even the clothes from his back. And he's not the only one still alive in the hall.

With what little psychic strength he can spare, he feeds the anchor he's got on Kenny while he writhes on the pulpit floor. No dignity left.

He opens his mouth to speak, but a man is standing over him.

A man with black hair like death and blue eyes the color of a snowstorm at sea. When had he decided to…?

Rassilon watches the Doctor's hand arch out from itself in a ribbon of skin, and sets his jaw. His feet are fast becoming deuterium weights plated in lead, now- but he will not falter. Nor will he allow a creation of his own hand's making best him utterly.

He forces foot after booted foot toward the edge where the Doctor is lying. There is blood beneath the man; it should be pooling. Instead, nature is sharpening the bleed into red spears and thrusting them into the dark.

His fellow Time Lord is naked, clinging to the very tip of the pulpit's retractable floor-foil.

"I found a working interface, and have initiated the aperture's emergency closures," he calls, meeting the other man's pink-eyed, raggedy gaze.

"Let me guess… you don't know if it will close in time to save us!" the Doctor screeches in a harsh foreign tongue over the wheeze of harsh stellar winds. "In that case," he coughs, and red-orange ribbons of blood from his battered throat cascade between his lips in licks of abstract fire, lighting up the void in temporary little streams.

His fingers are pressing so hard on his stomach, there are palm-shaped bruises across his bump, just shy of his navel like protective leaves covering a rose hip. His runner's leg is hooked in the pulpit's hollow back.

"You aren't just holding Kenny, are you, Doctor?" Rassilon asks, his blue eyes watering in the sucking, roiling pull of the barely-contained black hole beneath their feet. " I will do what I can as well, but you were always better at Sepulchasm."

The Doctor gags on a grin, half-choking behind such a slight shake of his head that Rassilon almost thinks he might have missed it.

But Rassilon can see the shadows beneath the younger man's eyes, growing like whale-roots.

He won't last. He can't.

Suddenly the Doctor is watching Rassilon with eyes like frozen spring, so calmly, yet, so full of tumult. Suddenly those eyes are thawing into melt. Suddenly they're wide and shining and filled with something Rassilon has not seen in anyone's eyes for a very long time.

The Doctor pushes himself up to stand, his body fierce as he continues to hold back gravity for Kenny and at least a hundred others.

One hand is constantly at his side as he levitates himself, gliding over the center of the Eye.

Kenny is unconscious in his bubble of swirling light and heat. It's getting smaller… soon it will be a thin soap bubble about to pop.

"I wouldn't be able to do this if not for Flamina's help…" the Doctor murmurs telepathically, cutting a quick slice into every available mind. It's not _exactly_ a lie… more a… half-truth.

His eyes meet Borusa's as she peeks from behind her saving pillar. Her hand is outstretched. She's helping, too.

"Now then, that's what I like to see! But I have to borrow something _else_ from you now!" he yells, forgetting to tune himself inward. Inside his womb, seven month old Flamina's tiny red hands curl instinctively around the blood-rich stem connecting them. Even in her sleep, she's holding on.

"Rassilon, how long? I have a plan!"

Rassilon, even Rassilon, is straining now against the tide.

His fingers ball in his blood red robes; his icy eyes bleed frozen drops as he opens his mouth.

No sound. His mouth is too dry.

He tries to reach the Doctor telepathically, but for some reason, the man's mind is tangled in a golden shroud- he cannot get in. Perhaps the Rose Ring is the cause of it…

A clicking noise erupts in his head; the automatic closure is beginning.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

The great gears marry in tandem.

Click. Click. Click.

Click-click.

The aperture hisses shut.

Everything is easier all at once- abruptly. Precisely. Bodies tumble to the safety of the stairwell floors like blows.

But as Rassilon floats the last flailing Time Lord in his field of vision over to the safety of those stairwells, he remembers.

He remembers that someone is missing.

Two someones.

He roars to the edge to look over, and finds…

The Doctor opens his eyes on the ice cream stick foil. His fingers are white against the metal. Did he pass out like this? His other hand is flat below him. How many seconds has he… wait, what is that blur of blue hair and naked bum down there below him, rushing to the floor one hundred and three levels down?

Kenny! Oh god.

Without thinking he lets go of the foil and falls backward, crossing his arms over his chest as his feet rise to the top and his head rushes downward.

The Doctor can see Kenny down there, plummeting to a messy death on the shiny surface of the Great Seal.

_Rassilon managed to get the aperture closed, thank god,_ he thinks as his body becomes a bullet.

With his arms outstretched, waiting to grab poor Kenny, he makes a solemn request to the Pythian child growing in his womb.

"Hullo, little pink thing! My little fire-breathing cherubim! Can you lend me your wings?"

Of course, the child doesn't answer. She's asleep.

His laughter echoes through the halls, and then he whispers, "Well, I'll just use my own then."

He forces knobs of muscle to crawl up from between his shoulderblades, weaving a set of bird's wings with nerves for thread and bone for a needle.

He pumps blood into the new shapes, engorging them, folding them into his personal time and space until he is solid and diving, a seabird after fish.

Kenny's fingers loom nearer and nearer. If he can just reach farther, fly a little harder, wring more blood out his hearts… the floor is close, but the Eye is still warping things. There is a lot of space between them and the ground, still. But, there is also no way of knowing how long the warping will last. Perhaps they'll both go more fish custard. No more TARDIS. No more kissing Trouble with a capital Pond.

His finger is close to Kenny's hand. He stretches, feeling something pulpy give in his back near the stab wound.

_Uh-oh. This sort of thing rarely makes the good kind of papers…_ he clicks the Rose Ring, then remembers. No more failsafe. Oh dear. He could cease to exist, or be turned into spaghetti. _Well, pasta isn't such a bad thing to be,_ he thinks… _unless you're gluten intolerant._

As he fades in and out of pretty much everything, he careens toward Kenny, groping blindly as the rush of nromal gravity drags him out of the front seat of conscousness. The twisting darkness settles over him, and he thinks of Jack.


	23. Chapter 23

ChapterTwenty-Three: Dead Bees and Refugees

_Flashback._

Jack Harkness doesn't know the name of his latest lay.

What he does know is that the line of the young man's cheekbone is wide, and that his bony body looks good in the black Italian suit he'd bought for Angelo Colosanto on the fifth of January, 1928.

He knows the young man has a preference for fizzy drinks, and carries his own straw so as to wring every last burst of carbonation from any given beverage.

He knows the young man has cool skin, like a dead man he used to date on Cephali Prime. Only that lover had been an android with no head, a robot with a knack for numbers and a real taste for a dry martini, no onion, hold the olive.

As he considers the young man sleeping in his bed, he remembers the name he's taken for himself, in this room full of sparse furniture and strewn clothes, on this planet thick with space and light and parks and silver buildings. Steve. Late night, he'd finally just taken to calling the young man Slim, because the pale beauty hadn't given a name. "No names, no consequences," Slim had told him, when he'd stepped out of the giant fire engine red pyramid cake like a model, all legs and distance.

"Are you married, I wonder?" Jack muses aloud, his thoughts idling for a moment on the golden ring carved with roses sitting on the squarish, modern-glass nightstand by the bed.

The black suit is in a pile on the floor, more of a pool, really. A white dress shirt sits on top like a kitten at the top of a pile.

He'd kept it, of course, in case Angel, _Angelo_,decided to… but Angelo is dead now. He went the normal way. Smart, ingenious bastard. He'd found a null field generator and installed it under his bed.

"Yes, technically." comes the voice of Slim from the scruffy rabbit head buried halfway into Jack's pillow. "She doesn't care what I do, mostly. I'm very clean. Besides, she's better with a gun."

Jack forces a come-on growl. It isn't a chore, he's decided, if it gets Slim to turn round so Jack can take his tasty earlobe in his mouth. "Yeah, but you aren't afraid to get dirty. I liked you, last night. You were ravenous."

Slim relaxes into Jack's chest and right arm, a boneless sack of lower body temperature. Sated, complacent. He breathes there for a while, one hand awkardly exploring Jack's bits for buried treasure like a blind pirate, the other lapping lazily at his own flat belly, palpating below his odd little outie navel where Jack cannot see.

"You know Steve, I think I love you." Slim stalls with upward slinking bedroom peridots, dragging a purposeful finger down Jack's pecs as Jack plays tic-tac-toe on his own marginal abs. "You re a life-saver. I needed you last night. For many reasons."

The Time Agent feels a chill grab his spine. He flows with it, in through the nose, out through the mouth. "I bet you say that to all the girls. You're going to leave me, aren't you?"

Slim nods his head; the floppy hair inching past his ears lends a waggishness to the motion. His fingers grope suddenly for the ring on the night table. He clutches his body, clenching as if he's in pain.

Jack's hand curves around him, oozing control, even concern as Slim reaches out to take the ring and its chain with shaking fingers.

"Session is up- but it was special. An us rather than a job. You could never be a job, Jack. I didn't want to leave you like this. It's… hurtful and rather unprofessional, and we pleasured each other so much last night, that… I'm sorry sweetheart, I really am. I'm pregnant. Previous engagement, but you helped. It's a girl. _She_ is, I should say. _She's_ a girl. You're hardly obligated… and I really need to take care of something. Not the way I wanted to leave you, not after… well… huh. But then we don't always get what we want, do we?"

With a barked laugh, Jack wraps him up and just… he wraps him up. Then Slim takes his head in his lap, playing with his hair.

"Okay, beautiful. This I can deal with. I had a friend though- really loved the bastard. Still do. He was kind of transmogrifying, that way. Except _he _would _never_ have _told_ me what you just did. Kudos." Jack reaches around and feels Slim up the back, rubbing the man's cool, soft skin. Strange how giving this particular lay a massage makes him feel like he's the one being soothed. He pauses, just long enough to get a few words out before Slim moves away from him in secret litheness, supine in his escape. The fairest of them all, Jack's traitor hindbrain squeaks behind all that snazzy white matter. "Whatever you need, honey- I only ask you to remember me fondly. If you want, you can bring the sprog by my way for ice cream dates and plenty of casual spoiling, baggage-free. His fault. He's almost as good as me at it."

The eyes have him. Those eyes, they're keepers. Trouble is, he's made a career out of knowing how to whistle. It takes nothingng at all to know when someone is whistling back.

Too soon, and Slim's available thumb caresses the rose sticking up from the ring, sending him away, his white skin and those deepset, gemstone-apple eyes blazing a permanent silhouette across Jack's retinas. At least until he dies again. Was that the spectre of a smile in the burn of molecular shift?

_I was right,_ Jack thinks as he pulls on a fresh shirt, a deep blue one that screams 'I get things done.' _It wasn't a standard personal distortion ring. _And Slim had called him Jack.


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Eye of Fatima

"THETA!"

The Panopticon doors fling open; a woman in white bursts into the hall, her naked feet clapping against the stone in frantic rhythm, ringing in the back of everyone's psyches like the hoofbeats of a night mare.

"Don't get all impressed by the wings, sweetheart, for your blood pressure's sake; it's just a bit of tinkering with baby's dna. Our girl's a Pythia!"

River skids to a halt in front of the Doctor, a frown crawling over her bones. He imagines he'll die, once it reaches her face.

But all she does is cock her head at him, spilling gold curls all over like yellow plump cherries from a bowl. With a toe, she rubs a smudge from his cheek, then gives him a nudge in the belly, rocking him slightly. "I didn't stuff that plum."

"Did too. 'Cause I say so." he snuffles. His nose is broken; a wing sticks out oddly from somewhere beneath him, a ruined scaffold of dirty white feathers. There's some sinew poking out. "Oh River… I can't remember how to fold these back up. My math is g-good but I'm rubbish with tents." He stiffens, attempting to spread a limp, machine-grease stained mess of primary feathers in the blue-haired man's direction. Do they come with a switch? Kenny here 's crisis of passion got m-my k-k-kidney kebab'd, and now I want a k-k-kip."

The blue-haired Time Lord stroking the Doctor's face looks up, his gold eyes veiled by a thin, dull, happy kind of shame that colors his whole demeanor. "He asked me not to hurt the child, so I stabbed him in the kidney. He's got three more. I was having a mood swing because my… what's the word… psychotic boyfriend left me."

"Sounds like someone I know."River says, letting her building glare surface from the depths again.

"You're just jealous 'cause I saw the Master first. Spiteful creature." He gives a crooked wink at her, but, ineffectually, it misses her bum.

Turning back to the Doctor again, Kenny runs a hand through his sapphire locks, splashed violet from the Doctor's blood, and sighs, resigned once more. "I am grateful to him, Madam. If he had not grabbed my hand, and then if I had not woken up and caught him when he blacked out, we both would have perished. He saved me in more ways than one. As it is, we hit several objects on the way down before I woke and slowed our decent. Again, I am grateful." He gives a slight bow of the head,and his bloodied hair falls completely free of its last ditch twist, cascading past his shoulders.

"You know I'm sorry for the mess, don't you, S-Sweetie?" moans the Doctor, a muscle in his chin twitching slightly as he shivers again.

"Oh just shut up, both of you. Especially you, Kenny." adds River, planting both hands on her hips and widening her eyes- oh that classic Pond stare. "… and be glad he's not dead, else I would have killed you already. Now hop. I'll warm him while you set bones, and then we can wait for the proper medics."

"That's the sad thing, R-River- we haven't any. I'm the only veterinarian in these here parts. The Infirmary is automated, which qualifies as stupid." With teeth champing like horses on a hill, the Doctor turns to Kenny and adds, "Now see, Kenny?" Then he stops and rests for a moment, panting a little faster now that there are potentially vengeful feminine hands in the general vicinity of his many broken bones and bruises. "Use the right words, and women aren't so scary! Oh ow, that's… Ow. River! M' cold."

"Are you saying, Sweetie, that I'm a Chinese Finger Puzzle?" River breathes the words. Then, she backward-spoons her body into his, hoping that her slightly warmer temperature will stop the tremor she sees growing in his muscles. Her arms she wraps around him, like always, muffing his mouth.

"No, 'm saying yor a shy-neez woom. An undisifurabuw widdwe, wwapped in a mythtewy inthide ananigma. Thank you for moving your hand. Ow, no, don't pinch me there! Please, it hurts! River! Stop ittt! Wah-ahahhhhh! Ahah-ahhh…"

His pitiful, confused cry is enough to make her shiver, too. Has she touched something? Is there something Kenny missed?

She reaches over the arm he's plastered to his side and palpates his right shoulder.

There is a lump there, close to the secondary bundle of nerves. A bruise ought to be forming… but she can't see it without turning him.

Then, a wet, hog-slop gurgle draws River's attention to the blue tinge around his lips. She sucks in a breath and smacks him hard on the cheek.

"My love, I need you to open your eyes for me. I want to see your pretty face. Been admiring your strong chin."

No answer.

"Well I have to say I'm not surprised, you daft sod. You sleep too much. Wake up or I'm going to tell the first Time Lord I see about you and Elizabeth the First."

"Mmm, no, I don' wanna grow up. M' a Toys'R'Us kid. And Bitey the Cybermat for President… nuffle, mminghatoddylala…" snore

River feels her cheeks flush with hot blood. Bastard. As she watches and feels, he falls asleep again.

"He might need the healing coma, but with the added stress of the child, only Providence can tell." a new voice offers, so young, so… crisply female, yet old like new snow.

River feels a small hand on her head, the weight of fingers strong and delicate. They are stroking her hair.

"I am Borusa, Lady River; I was one of his Academy tutors." the little girl adds, granting a short smile to the back of River's head, "Although, that was some years back. And I was a man. Certain roles have since reversed, despite me."

Footsteps quicken all around them.

Borusa stiffens and pats River's head again, then steps back and to the side as a bedraggled rainbow of a processional makes its ambling way forward to them.

A man in red is there, in front, his black hair greying, his levelled gaze a frozen galaxy masquerading as two blue marbles, stone face fixed on the Doctor.

River's back is to him when she speaks.

"Is this mess your fault?" she asks the man in red, posing the question by association to the figures behind him. She doesn't have to look to know it is.

In his sleep, the Doctor shivers against her, snuggling in.

"Yes." the man says quietly. Then he gets to one knee and waits. The air is still, and no one breathes.

Only then, when she slides her hand beneath the Doctor's side does she notice the warm, sticky wet of new blood. She'd thought the wound would be closed, by now… had the blade gone that far in? If it had… in any case, the idiot's lying on it. He must be cold, if he can't feel that.

Rassilon says nothing. But all their noses find it. All their eyes can see. Their hindbrains know it by instinct.

In one swift spin, River Song turns and pivots, vaulting her agile body into a crouch as she presses the barrel of her fully primed pulse gun square to Rassilon's forehead.

_I'm sorry, my love._

With tear tracks reddening her cheeks, she fires, over and over, once for every horror story the Doctor ever told her.

…

…

…

Nothing.

Rassilon is still kneeling there, waiting with the rest of the Time Lords, his eyes on her like molten blue dwarfs.

She looks down at the gun as it slips from her hands, then she looks at her husband curled naked and unconscious on the floor. A Time Lady, dressed in 40's grey silk and smelling of roses, hands her a black velvet robe lined with smooth, thick fur so fine that stars seem to glint from its folds; River takes it and drapes it over him, tucking it around the small mound of his stomach, his boy-neck. The hypothermic Gonzo mask between his legs, plus pom-poms. The frozen pink nipples like little mauve binkies.

"You clicked the safety on while I was checking that broken wing of yours, didn't you, Benjamin?" River says, craning so their foreheads can touch.

Then she closes her eyes, and smiles.


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter Twenty-Five: After the Hávamál, Where Goes the Door-Dwelling Stranger?

"Damn it!"

The Assassin storms out of the comms room. His small feet echo down the hall, ding ding, ding ding.

It's been only a few hours since his nice ending erupted like a boil all over his shoes.

"My Lord Rassilon?" a passing Dromiean asks, holding out a hand.

How cute. She's concerned. That makes this grand, a bit of an appetiser before his exit then. An idiot, because she doesn't know him yet. Doesn't _know_ yet. Hasn't _heard_. Head in a book librarians! Fucking imbeciles, worrying about what kind of glue keeps moisture away all day!

He makes a grabbing motion, thrusting his elbow out to the side as his thoughts direct murder.

The woman's thick mop of greasy grey curls scrabbles over her head in little chunks as she squirms. Her feet flail. Her silver-draped arms shimmer like two big fish lifted out of the water. Then he flicks his wrist. Her neck breaks, in little crunches, and then she doesn't twitch anymore. Like a bloody great bird.

His hand falls to his side and he walks along the hall, touching a finger to the smooth surface. Trailing it. He's always hated birds.

Somewhere behind him, the woman regenerates.

She screams for the Doctor, but it comes in a gurgle. Stupid chit. There are ways to disable future regenerations.

As he reaches the last corner before the Infirmary, he begins to let his memory drift over a certain moment he enjoyed. Ah, yes- that day a few weeks back when he'd found that damn Myrtlegull in his office. He'd stuffed the Terrorist's ring down its gullet and sent it elsewhere. That had been nice. Stupid thing wasn't even fit to eat.

The Infirmary door is unguarded; the fools must have rushed off during all the fun in the Panopticon.

He slips inside. There is only one bed being used. Everything is tidy. There are glass cabinets with food pills everywhere, and canisters of grow-skin gas capsules for the handheld medical scanners. Spanners, more like. Perhaps he should fill those with spectrox concentrate before he leaves?

The Doctor's wife, that gun-happy bitch with the curls. She's left a book open on the pull-out tray near her husband's monitor. Whore must have run screaming when the dung hit during The Testimony. _What a shame_, he thinks as he skirts the Doctor's bed, fingering the white sheets from which one of the annoying Time Lord's toes are poking out, _that interference from his little parting gift to Gallifrey had fried the comms just as he'd been about to watch them all get blasted into the Void. _Oh well. At least it was over. He can just see the green of Hitchemus coming over his readouts, filling the screens of the little ship he's -borrowed- from Confiscation and Storage. All he has to do is retrieve the Node fixed to the Great Seal, then use it to teleport off-planet.

Oh, how he's missed her, his White Lady.

He's going to be with her soon.

His hands reach toward the Time Lord on the bed, feeling for pulses. The man is barely breathing, mired in the throes of a healing coma perhaps. Well, he won't need that where he's going. And he's so still- yes, definitely some level of coma.

The Assassin punches a fist through the grey wall near the left side of the bed, then yanks at some silver, blue and red wires, tearing them from their moorings. The monitoring console attached to the Doctor's pregnant body, giving him nutrient fluids and bloods through a series of translucent, fleshy tube-like connectors fitted up through the bed's back, goes blank; first, one last blink, and then a crawling blue line worms its way across the darkening glass, running.

"Well there'll be no more…" he pauses to grab more wires, "… of that!" and yanks the last lines free from the right side panel, this time.

The man on the bed shivers and turns pale as the sustaining organic cannula eject and smack the floor, flopping around beneath the bed like headless little silver snakes and smearing blood everywhere. So the wound had been deep then. Good for Kenny. The clingy git finally got something right.

"Get up, fool." he murmurs, crushing the Doctor's arm as he slowly curls one finger then two, then three and the rest around the man's tricep.

Pale-faced and grey around the mouth like an old woman, the Doctor screams, his jaws crunching up and apart in a rictus. The wild and rolling green grapes of his irises turn to melons as he and his quavering limbs are dragged down the hallway to the Panopticon.

…

…

…

Turns and corners all begin to look alike, a grey line here, a green chair here. A yellow chair there, a grey line here. Orange chairs in rows like candy sticks.

The familiar, boring walls of the Citadel are rushing by.

The Doctor, in considering his bare feet while the rest of him trails from the Assassin's hand by way of wrist, feels as though his eyes will explode. Both hearts are thrumming in his chest, humming slightly out of time like an engine about to stall. "Can you hurry it up," he whines, dabbing his foot in his own blood for fun and spreading it behind them every so often. It's like Hansl and Gretl for grown-ups, he tells himself steadfastly as his vision whites back and forth again in a to and fro fog, only with a blue box instead of a house and a nicer bitey mad lady who would never consider children good eating.

The Assassin drags on, one of the Doctor's arms over his shoulder now. He calls back to his prize, but the Doctor blacks out again, his punishment a vicious jerk of the Assassin's arm which sends him sprawling.

"What are you doing? Wake up, you useless animal. Wake up or I'll gut your wife."

At this the Doctor smiles. "Oh go ahead- but…you won't…enjoy it much, I'm afraid. She was taught to skin… to… skin… small animals as a child. Bit of… bit of negligence in her upbringing…" Despite his weaving in and out, he slides a shaking hand across his throat in a slicing motion, and his lips curl in a nasty grin.

A foot finds the wound in his side and kicks. The Doctor archs his body at odd angles, aiming for a corner of wall, and crumples in a heap like a wet newspaper.

"Be quiet! Fucking sod. You are a non-entity!" yells the man who is dragging him down passage after exhausting passage.

But still, he smiles, whispering, "Are we there yet?"

The Assassin stops, reaches down.

The Doctor can see his hand dimly in the flickering light. It's not the lights really, but he can pretend. In any case, they're a few metres from the door. He's going to black out again…

The fingers fall through mist, to grab his hair and wrench him up.

"Say hello, Doctor," the Assassin says, holding up the Time Lord's wrist and flapping it at the gaggle of Time Lords standing on the Seal as he hops from one foot to the other, always turning, always switching stance as he heads for the Seal.

It's only a few metres away. A few more bloody footsteps. He's been swimming in meat for too long.

His short hand slides in for his garrote; digging in his heels at the circle of the Seal, the styled figure eight of Rassilon's symbol, he steps over the edge, right onto the Node he has hidden there.

"Why aren't you trying to stop me?" he breathes, remembering to be winded after lugging the other Time Lord all the way from the Infirmary.

The wire pulls more tightly around the Doctor's neck, cutting in. A line of blood forms.

River Song breaks the line of Time Lords by her mere presence, her figure a starkness among all that red and grey and black and blue and purple. And brown.

A flood of eyes are on him now.

_Good, he thinks_, as his lips curve up and his eyes slip wide on the gathering crowd. It's how he wants this.

Rain is cascading down on them, as it often does. The fickle ceiling clouds are blocking the view of on high.

"Be gentle, Dallyrasse!" cries the Doctor, wrenching one hand in between his neck and the garrote just before the Assassin has the time to pull it closer together and cut off his life. 'He's been lost a long time! I'm dizzy now- you have to help me!" he raises his hand, and remembers Hitchemus, when he called the storm and left those watching to wonder if it was really just the armband he used, or whatever had driven him to play that violin until the strings had burned and snapped and furled like fern leaves.

With a nod to the Doctor, Rassilon too thrusts out his hand, palm up, as if expecting a tithe long withheld. In the clouds high above, lightning crackles, buzzing through the metal work lacings of the Citadel dome like a spiralling, vast aurora, in so many colors, that only a few can be seen. Yellows mixing into golds and greens like ribbons, great seas of orange fire spinning into red curls like clay on a wheel, red crashing into violet sky and blue sapphires, all of it distilling into silent symphony on crystal and stone and metal, on arches and doorways, on faces. On eyes.

For a moment, the Assassin is blinded; transfixed. He cannot take it in. His body shudders

Particles crack and fall, showering on all the players in the Doctor's little game.

From the heavens, there falls an egg-shaped shadow…


	26. Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Fairy Queen

As the shadow plummets, the Doctor slips to the ground, his hand still raised, breathlessly humming something in an annoyingly high falsetto about lollipops and guilds…

The Assassin never sees it as it strikes; he is gone in a puff of fine dust, as though someone poured hot water on him.

"It must have been the ring," River says, bending to pick up the silver band on the pile of Gallifreyan detritus, as it has spilled out from under the fallen Pod in a pool. "Was it keeping him alive, I wonder… the Pod must have interacted with it somehow."

"We might never know the reasons, child," says Borusa, stepping up and holding out her hand for the ring. "Who can say, with that boy? But I will ask Pasmodius once he has fully revived. He was stuck in the Tomb for a while, you know." She smiles, then cocks her head at the Doctor, who, still wearing nothing but his dusty white shirt, has got a second wind from sheer fascination and is staring at the large egg-shaped object sticking from the Panopticon floor- upon which he is currently leaning, for his dignity's sake.

But then, the Pod opens. A shell-like door raises up. A bit of air puffs out, and soon, a head full of straggles of grey hair, half-stuffed beneath a yellow scarf.

Those eyes… those beautiful grey eyes.

They meet his. His meet hers.

He feels Creation shift beneath him. His body acts drained, without blood.

"Mamlaurea?" he chokes, gasping for breath and groping his chest with a flattened palm as he staggers backward toward River. But he doesn't make it. All the strength flows out of his legs and he folds like heavy cream toward the Pod.

But the old woman grabs his palm and opens a mouth full of half as many teeth. She cries, as she reaches for him, clutching his fingers to her wrinkled brown face, "Oh my master! Lord Other, you came! As you promised! There is no time; we must go now."

As he wanes away, still staring at her, his face turns a hue that can only resemble several types of pale flour, but she catches him, holding him close to her yellow-wrapped bosom. She pulls.

Rassilon takes a step toward her, holding his hands out palm up, shaking them wildly, his azure gaze a warm and pleading ocean sparkling a no that might once have been heard for years in any direction.

The old woman wails, clutching the Doctor's face to her dry old chest, her thin, branchy arms wrapped around him protectively. With a gnarled hand, she reaches into the Pod and presses a button.

As the Doctor's green eyes close on River's face, the world screams away, leaving the dazed Panopticon less two or so warm bodies, and fewer questions.

On the shore of no living sea, a rabbit-haired man in an undone bowtie waits in an austere armchair of bright fuschia, its surface dotted with curls and leaves of silver damask. There is a pale yellow teacup of tea in his hand, set on a delicate saucer of robin's egg blue.

Sometimes, he is an old grandfather in a black coat. A clown in a bowl cut. A dandy in an opera jacket. Sometimes he is a tall bohemian, all teeth and curls. An indecisive young cricketer with blonde hair. Sometimes a short stout uncle in a panama hat, with an umbrella close by. A Victorian gentleman with a bluish-greenish-brownish coat, and pretty curls. And a pocketwatch. An angry soldier with closecut hair, wearing a black leather jumper. A tall, geekish avenger in a brown suit, wearing converse.

Sometimes he is all of these.

To-day, he brushes off his tweed jacket, whichs hangs on the chair back, adjusts his bowtie. Takes a sip of his tea. With a sigh, he flares his nostrils, packing his nares with the salt of the surf and the crisp sea breath, patiently waiting for the girl to come out from the waves.

His black boots are off, sitting to the side of his chair and stuffed with his dark grey stockings. His feet are naked, and there is sand between his toes.

On his lap there is a book, faded and dog-eared, perched precariously across the scuffed knees of his rolled up trousers. The brownish cover reads:

_A Tree Grows in Brooklyn._

To be continued in: The Magic Flight


End file.
